Explains how Native Americans understand the world and their place in it and discusses what other cultures can learn by studying Native American beliefs and traditions.

This meditation by an award winning historian calls for a new way oflooking at the natural world and our place in it, while boldly challenging theassumptions that underlie the way we teach and think about both history andtime. Calvin Luther Martin's In the Spirit of the Earth is a provocativeaccount of how the hunter-gatherer image of nature was lost--with devastatingconsequences for the environment and the human spirit. According to Martin, our current ideas about nature emerged during neolithictimes, (...) as humans began to domesticate animals and farm the land. In thehunter-gatherer mind, animals and plants were spiritual beings and the earth areliable provider. But in neolithic innovations Martin finds the roots of ourown curiously alienated relationship with other living things and with theearth itself. This alienation is revealed not only in our artifice--thetechnology that moves us further and further away from nature--but even in theway we speak about the world. It is revealed most dramatically, perhaps, inthe horrific destruction we have visited on animals and landscapes. Martin sees the shift to agricultural economies as a change in spiritual imagination. This new approach to food getting meant a new understanding ofourselves and the world--a new, powerful image of the self relative to plantsand animals. It led to food surpluses, a population boom, the appearance ofcities and ceremonial centers, and the emergence of priestly classes and rulingelites--in short, to all the achievements, follies, and horrors of"civilization." Martin argues that history--his own discipline--and human centered historicalconsciousness lie at the heart of this ultimately destructive ideology.Notions of order and progress, of a chosen people and linear time, fuel oursense that the world is ours to improve, exploit, and even destroy. We need torediscover the wisdom and sanity of less presumptuous ideas of nature--aprocess that demands a much larger narrative than historians have been writingand telling. Without calling for a return to hunting and gathering, Martinasks if some of what we lost--or left behind--in the distant past might bereclaimed and used again. To make peace with the earth. To make peace withourselves. "Many will respond with that oft heard reply, But we cannot go back!To which I respond, But we never left--never left our true, real context, thatis. Homo is still here on this planet earth, abiding in our most fundamentaland necessary nature by its fundamental and necessary terms. We left all ofthat only, really, in our fevered imagination. It all began as an act ofimagination, an illusory image--most fundamentally, an image of fear--and so thecorrective process must likewise begin with an image. Let us re-learn, as hunter-gatherers knew to the core of their being, that this place and itsprocesses (even in our death) always takes care of us--that Homo's citizenship, and errand, rest not with any creed or state, but with 'that star's substancefrom which he had arisen.'"--from In the Spirit of the Earth. (shrink)

Over the course of the last four decades, William Leon McBride has distinguished himself as one of the most esteemed and accomplished philosophers of his generation. This volume—which celebrates the occasion of his seventy-fifth birthday—includes contributions from colleagues, friends, and formers students and pays tribute to McBride’s considerable achievements as a teacher, mentor, and scholar.

The coming of bioethics to Singapore / W. Calvin Ho and Sylvia S.N. Lim -- The impact of the bioethics advisory committee on the research community in Singapore / Charmaine K.M. Chan and Edison T. Liu -- Engaging the public : the role of the media / Chang Ai-Lien and Judith Tan -- Confucian trust and the biomedical regulatory framework in Singapore / Anh Tuan Nuyen -- The clinician-researcher : a servant of two masters? / Alastair V. Campbell, Jacqueline (...) Chin, and Teck Chuan Voo -- The US model for oversight of human stem cell research / Lindsay Parham and Bernard Lo -- Genetics and stem cell research : models of international policy-making / Bartha Maria Knoppers, Emily Kirby and Rosario Isasi -- Public engagement and bioethics commissions / Thomas H. Murray and Ross S. White -- Norm-making on human-animal chimeras and hybrids in Singapore, the United Kingdom and the international domain / W. Calvin Ho and Martin Bobrow -- How will future bioethical issues engage Singapore? / John Elliott. (shrink)

This article reveals that the original owner of a first edition copy of John Calvin’s Commentarii in Isaiam Prophetam in the collection of the John Rylands Library was not the unknown David Forrest of Carluke, Lanarkshire as asserted and recorded by Alexander Gordon, Principal of the Unitarian Home Missionary College, Manchester, from whom the library acquired the book, but was the recognised Scottish Reformer and compatriot of John Knox, David Forrest of Haddington. An investigation into Forrest’s background, gleaned mainly (...) from contemporary documents, provides biographical details and an insight into the role this reformer played during the Scottish Reformation and demonstrates that Forrest’s ownership of the Calvin Commentary is historically noteworthy. A comparison of Forrest’s signature in the book with one made in a document during his position as General of the Scottish Mint proves his ownership beyond doubt. (shrink)

This collection of essays is a critical document in Continental philosophy, reflecting its recent history, its present state, and its debt to Calvin O. Schrag. It begins with an overview of philosophy's role and responsibility or "task" and of Schrag's contributions to it, written from the perspective of a resolute defender of the phenomenological tradition that Schrag's work has extended and reconfigured. The essays are organized around the four conceptual figures widely considered Schrag's most significant and original philosophical achievements: (...) transversal rationality, the self after post-modernity, the fourth cultural value sphere, and communication praxis. The authors focus on topics ranging from Cartesian rationality to Foucauldian rational relativism; from transcendence in relation to the self to the Schragean self's connections with discourse, action, and community; from religion's disruptive presence in contemporary philosophy to recent developments in the philosophy of language. (shrink)

This chapter examines Merold Westphal's critique on the works of Calvin Schrag about the relationship of philosophy and a theistic belief in God. It talks about why neither devils speak as atheist nor god as theist. It reveals that God refuses to appear on philosophy's terms because in God's transcendence, God would appear more otherwise than Being. Also, theism does not explain why the divine “otherwise” ultimately signifies that a personally loving Creator and Redeemer in loving unconditionally always already (...) love also impersonally. (shrink)

This article examines the Basotho’s views on sexuality within a theological context as wellas the conflict between Christianity and cultural beliefs. Most Basotho have strong opinions on the subject of sexuality and those views undoubtedly emanate from the Basotho culture,which makes it necessary to evaluate them. The issue of sexuality is always a topic of discussion amongst people and did not go unnoticed by church fathers, like Augustine. Thomas Aquinas also expressed an interest in the topic in the Middle-Ages. Likewise, (...) reformers of the calibre of Martin Luther and John Calvin espoused views on sexuality. Itis clear that the aforementioned theologians made a marked contribution toward shapingthe current views on sexuality, especially amongst theologians of this age and this is thereason for revisiting their views in this article examining the Basotho view on sexuality.In examining Basotho views on sexuality, the writer of this article will then discuss andevaluate the views of Augustine, Aquinas, Luther and Calvin with special reference tosexual intercourse, sexual intercourse within matrimony, extramarital sexual intercourseand also the unmarried state. (shrink)

Maximize Expected Choiceworthiness (MEC) is a theory of decision-making under moral uncertainty. It says that we ought to handle moral uncertainty in the way that Expected Value Theory (EVT) handles descriptive uncertainty. MEC inherits from EVT the problem of fanaticism. Roughly, a decision theory is fanatical when it requires our decision-making to be dominated by low-probability, high-payoff options. Proponents of MEC have offered two main lines of response. The first is that MEC should simply import whatever are the best solutions (...) to fanaticism on offer in decision theory. The second is to propose statistical normalization as a novel solution on behalf of MEC. This paper argues that the first response is open to serious doubt and that the second response fails. As a result, MEC appears significantly less plausible when compared to competing accounts of decision-making under moral uncertainty, which are not fanatical. (shrink)

I argue against pessimistic readings of the Buddhist tradition on which unawakened beings invariably have lives not worth living due to a preponderance of suffering (duḥkha) over well-being.

Online supplement, "Mulsow: Additions to Notes drawn from the 2002 edition of Moderne aus dem Untergrund" full versions of nearly 300 notes that were truncated in the print edition. Hosted on H. C. Erik Midelfort's website. Martin Mulsow's seismic reinterpretation of the origins of the Enlightenment in Germany won awards and renown in its original German edition, and now H. C. Erik Midelfort's translation makes this sensational book available to English-speaking readers. In Enlightenment Underground, Mulsow shows that even in (...) the late seventeenth century some thinkers in Germany ventured to express extremely dangerous ideas, but did so as part of a secret underground. Scouring manuscript collections across northern Europe, Mulsow studied the writings of countless hitherto unknown radical jurists, theologians, historians, and dissident students who pushed for the secularization of legal, political, social, and religious knowledge. Often their works circulated in manuscript, anonymously, or as clandestinely published books. Working as a philosophical microhistorian, Mulsow has discovered the identities of several covert radicals and linked them to circles of young German scholars, many of whom were connected with the vibrant radical cultures of the Netherlands, England, and Denmark. The author reveals how radical ideas and contributions to intellectual doubt came from Socinians and Jews, church historians and biblical scholars, political theorists, and unemployed university students. He shows that misreadings of humorous or ironic works sometimes gave rise to unintended skeptical thoughts or corrosively political interpretations of Christianity. This landmark book overturns stereotypical views of the early Enlightenment in Germany as cautious, conservative, and moderate, and replaces them with a new portrait that reveals a movement far more radical, unintended, and puzzling than previously suspected. (shrink)

This article considers the relationship between utilitarianism and the ethics of Early Buddhism and classical Indian Mahāyāna Buddhism. Section 2 discusses normative ethics. I argue (i) that Early Buddhist ethics is not utilitarian and (ii) that despite the many similarities between utilitarianism and Mahāyāna ethics, it is at best unclear whether Mahāyāna ethics is consequentialist in structure. Section 2 closes by reconstructing the Buddhist understanding of well-being and contrasting it to hedonism. -/- Section 3 focuses on applied ethics. I suggest (...) that two major choice-points for the Buddhist are, first, whether to accept the doctrine of rebirth and, second, whether to adopt a pessimistic or tentatively optimistic reading of Buddhist axiology. I assess the implications of the possible resulting views for various topics in applied ethics, including cause prioritization, global health and poverty, animal welfare, existential risk, space colonization, and human biomedical enhancement, comparing Buddhist answers to contemporary utilitarian positions on these issues. Along the way, I also argue against the pessimistic reading of Buddhist axiology and in favor of a moral-patient-affecting, rather than totalist, understanding of Buddhist population ethics. (shrink)

Non-Archimedean population axiologies – also known as lexical views – claim (i) that a sufficient number of lives at a very high positive welfare level would be better than any number of lives at a very low positive welfare level and/or (ii) that a sufficient number of lives at a very low negative welfare level would be worse than any number of lives at a very high negative welfare level. Such axiologies are popular because they can avoid the (Negative) Repugnant (...) Conclusion and satisfy the adequacy conditions given in the central impossibility result in population axiology due to Gustaf Arrhenius. I provide a novel argument against them which appeals to the way that good and bad lives can intuitively outweigh one other. (shrink)

Engages contemporary European thought on a variety of philosophical topics.

Many accept the following three theses in animal ethics. First, although animal welfare should not be—or at least, need not be—our top moral priority, it is not a trivial one either. Second, if an animal is sentient, then it is a moral patient. Third, the extinction of an animal species is a tragic outcome that we have moral reason to prevent. I argue that a traditional (i.e., pre-modern) Buddhist perspective pushes against the first thesis and that a naturalized Buddhist perspective (...) is inconsistent with the latter two. (shrink)

Contemporary or traditional? Blended or seeker? Pop or "classical"? Chorus or hymn? Combo or organ? Questions concerning music in worship abound these days. Is there a practical way to deal with these issues? In Music and Ministry: A Biblical Counterpoint, Calvin Johansson looks to God's Word for principles foundational to music ministry. Weaving together great scriptural truths, he establishes the need for a "directional balance" between pastoral contextualization and prophetic purity. In a time of facile musical accommodation of the (...) gospel to culture, Dr. Johansson suggests that a heightened concern for musical style and quality is in order—not for the sake of music, but for the sake of the gospel. (shrink)

L’addition, dans la cinquième édition en 1683 de La Logique ou L’Art de penser, d’un chapitre consacré à la définition générale du signe et de plusieurs chapitres relevant spécifiquement d’une analyse des signes linguistiques, a été parfois interprétée comme une apparition tardive du “problème du langage” dans le traité d’Arnauld et Nicole. Parce que la plupart de ces chapitres supplémentaires sont la transposition de passages auparavant destinés dans la Perpétuité de la foi (1669-1674) à réfuter le sens calviniste de Ceci (...) est mon corps, on a été enclin à attribuer l’importance de la question du signe et du “problème du langage” dans l’édition de 1683 à une origine théologique. J’essaie au contraire de montrer que, dès la première édition de L’Art de penser en 1662, la problématisation des écarts des expressions linguistiques avec une correspondance terme à terme entre les mots et les idées a été indissociable pour Port-Royal de l’analyse des opérations de l’esprit. Selon moi, dans la Perpétuité de la foi, la critique du sens calviniste de la formule eucharistique constitue elle-même une application de cette analyse logique du langage : les passages incorporés ensuite dans L’Art de penser sont dans le prolongement des réflexions de 1662 sur les difficultés d’adéquation entre le dire et le vouloir-dire. Je montre pour finir que la définition générale du signe à Port-Royal suppose une restructuration de la définition augustinienne du De doctrina christiana, et fonde en 1683 une identification de la relation de signification linguistique à un rapport de représentation des mots aux idées, qui vient redoubler le rapport de représentation des idées aux choses établi en 1662. (shrink)

This article considers the contemporary effective altruism (EA) movement from a classical Indian Buddhist perspective. Following barebones introductions to EA and to Buddhism (sections one and two, respectively), section three argues that core EA efforts, such as those to improve global health, end factory farming, and safeguard the long-term future of humanity, are futile on the Buddhist worldview. For regardless of the short-term welfare improvements that effective altruists impart, Buddhism teaches that all unenlightened beings will simply be reborn upon their (...) deaths back into the round of rebirth (samsāra), which is held to be undesirable due to the preponderance of duhkha (unsatisfactoriness, dis-ease, suffering) over well-being that characterizes unenlightened existence. This is the samsāric futility problem. Although Buddhists and effective altruists disagree about what ultimately helps sentient beings, section four suggests that Buddhist-EA dialogue nonetheless generates mutually-instructive insights. Buddhists – including contemporaries, such as those involved in Socially Engaged Buddhism – might take from EA a greater focus on explicit prioritization research, which seeks knowledge of how to do the most good we can, given our finite resources. EA, for its part, has at least two lessons to learn. First, effective altruists have tended to assume that the competing accounts of welfare converge in their practical implications. The Buddhist conception of the pinnacle of welfare as a state free from duhkha and, correspondingly, the Buddhist account of the path that leads to this state weigh against this assumption. Second, contrasting Buddhist with effective altruist priorities shows that descriptive matters of cosmology, ontology, and metaphysics can have decisive practical implications. If EA wants to give a comprehensive answer to its guiding question – “how can we do the most good?” – it must argue for, rather than merely assume, the truth of secular naturalism. (shrink)

This introductory guide to philosophy tackles the key area which students of the subject will cover, in a clear and informative way. The book is organised around the different areas of philosophy including Philosophy of Religion, Theory of Knowledge, Ethics, Social and Political Philosophy, and Philosophy of Mind. Contents: Philosophy of Knowledge; Perception and Knowledge; Descartes' Rationalism; Hume's Theory of Knowledge; Russel's Problems of Philosophy; A. J. Ayer's Language, Truth, and Logic; Problems in the Philosophy of Mind; Cartesian Dualism; Physicalism; (...) Persons; The Problem of Other Minds; Behaviourism; Freud and Psychoanalysis; The Problem of Free Will and Determinism; The Philosophy of the Social Sciences; Artificial Intelligence; The Philosophy of Religion; Introductory Remarks; Arguments For the Existence of God; Problems Facing the Religious Believer; The Concept of Faith; Verificationism and Religious Language; An Introduction to Ethics; Plato's Ethical Theory; Aristotle: the Nicomachean Ethics; Utilitarianism; Dentological Ethics; The Emotive Theory of Ethics; Richard Hare and Prescriptivism; Moral Principles and Behaviour; Jean-Paul Sartre and Existentialism; Social and Political Philosophy; Introduction to Social and Political Philosophy; Images of Society. (shrink)

Many philosophers and psychologists argue that out everyday ability to predict and explain the actions and mental states of others is grounded in out possession of a primitive 'folk' psychological theory. Recently however, this theory has come under challenge from the simulation alternative. This alternative view says that human beings are able to predict and explain each other's actions by using the resources of their own minds to simulate the psychological aetiology of the actions of the others. This book and (...) the companion volume Folk Psychology: The Theory of Mind Debate together offer a richly woven fabric of philosophical and psychological theory, which promises to yield real insights into the nature of our mental lives. (shrink)

Of course, although this view on meaning was the prevailing one for almost a century, many of the people who initiated the enterprise of logical semantics, including people like Frege and Wittgenstein, had an open eye for all that it did not catch. However, the logical means which Frege, Wittgenstein, Russell, and the generation that succeeded them, had at their disposal were those of classical mathematical logic and set-theory, and these indeed are not very suited for an analysis of other (...) aspects of meaning than those which the slogan covers. A real change in view then had to await the emergence of other concepts, which in due course became available mainly under the influence of developments in computer science and cognate disciplines such as artificial intelligence. And this is one of the reasons why it took almost a century before any serious and successful challenge of the view that meaning equals truthconditions from within logical semantics could emerge. (shrink)

This book explores a question central to philosophy--namely, what does it take for a belief to be justified or rational? According to a widespread view, whether one has justification for believing a proposition is determined by how probable that proposition is, given one's evidence. In this book this view is rejected and replaced with another: in order for one to have justification for believing a proposition, one's evidence must normically support it--roughly, one's evidence must make the falsity of that proposition (...) abnormal in the sense of calling for special, independent explanation. This conception of justification bears upon a range of topics in epistemology and beyond. Ultimately, this way of looking at justification guides us to a new, unfamiliar picture of how we should respond to our evidence and manage our own fallibility. This picture is developed here. (shrink)

Kyosei, a traditional Japanese concept, has been applied to a variety subjects, from biology to business. It has more recently become synonymous with the concepts of corporate responsibility, ethical decision making, stakeholder maximization, and responsible reciprocity. The purpose of this paper is to trace kyosei's modern business application back to ancient Confucian thought. The ideals associated with Confucianism were instrumental in the creation of Japanese business codes of ethics during the early part of the seventeenth century. A short history of (...) this period is presented to provide a contextual framework for understanding these codes. A specific code of ethics, called the shuchu kiyaku, is presented for the first time in English and shown to have direct roots in Confucian writings. Statements from modern company codes and from modern Japanese and American businessmen are presented to reflect the philosophy of business embodied in that ancient code of ethics. (shrink)

We consider how human subjects establish signaling conventions in the context of Lewis-Skyrms signaling games. These experiments involve games where there are precisely the right number of signal types to represent the states of nature, games where there are more signal types than states, and games where there are fewer signal types than states. The aim is to determine the conditions under which subjects are able to establish signaling conventions in such games and to identify a learning dynamics that approximates (...) how they succeed when they do. Our results suggest that human agents tend to use a win-stay/lose-shift with inertia dynamics to establish conventions in such games. We briefly consider the virtues and vices of this low-rationality dynamics. (shrink)

In _Ontological Terror_ Calvin L. Warren intervenes in Afro-pessimism, Heideggerian metaphysics, and black humanist philosophy by positing that the "Negro question" is intimately imbricated with questions of Being. Warren uses the figure of the antebellum free black as a philosophical paradigm for thinking through the tensions between blackness and Being. He illustrates how blacks embody a metaphysical nothing. This nothingness serves as a destabilizing presence and force as well as that which whiteness defines itself against. Thus, the function of (...) blackness as giving form to nothing presents a terrifying problem for whites: they need blacks to affirm their existence, even as they despise the nothingness they represent. By pointing out how all humanism is based on investing blackness with non-Being—a logic which reproduces antiblack violence and precludes any realization of equality, justice, and recognition for blacks—Warren urges the removal of the human from its metaphysical pedestal and the exploration of ways of existing that are not predicated on a grounding in Being. (shrink)

Neurobiologist William Calvin explores the human brain, positing that the neurons in the brain operate in an accelerated version of biological evolution, evolving ideas through random variations and selections, and supports his hypothesis with numerous ca.

In this paper I propose a new solution to the problem of change: situationalism. According to this view, parts of reality fundamentally disagree about what is the case and reality as a whole is unsettled (i.e. metaphysically indeterminate). When something changes, parts of the world irreconcilably disagree about what properties it has. From this irreconcilable disagreement, indeterminacy arises. I develop this picture using situations, which are parts of possible worlds; this gives it the name situationalism. It allows a B-theory endurance (...) view on which there is genuine incompatibility when things change. There are costs to the view, which are explored, but it is a novel approach which offers a distinct explanation of what happens when things exist through change. (shrink)

. Science at the interface with society is regarded with mistrust among parts of the public. Scientific judgments on matters of practical concern are not infrequently suspected of being incompetent and biased. I discuss two proposals for remedying this deficiency. The first aims at strengthening the independence of science and suggests increasing the distance to political and economic powers. The drawback is that this runs the risk of locking science in an academic ivory tower. The second proposal favors “counter-politicization” in (...) that research is strongly focused on projects “in the public interest,” that is, on projects whose expected results will benefit all those concerned by these results. The disadvantage is that the future use of research findings cannot be delineated reliably in advance. I argue that the underlying problem is the perceived lack of relevance and reliability and that pluralism is an important step toward its solution. Pluralism serves to stimulate a more inclusive research agenda and strengthens the well-testedness of scientific approaches. However, pluralism also prevents the emergence of clear-cut practical suggestions. Accordingly, pluralism is part of the solution to the credibility crisis of science, but also part of the problem. In order for science to be suitable as a guide for practice, the leeway of scientific options needs to be narrowed – in spite of uncertainty in epistemic respect. This reduction can be achieved by appeal to criteria that do not focus on the epistemic credentials of the suggestions but on their appropriateness in practical respect. (shrink)

Many societies have norms of equity – that those who make symmetric social contributions deserve symmetric rewards. Despite this, there are widespread patterns of social inequity, especially along gender and racial lines. It is often the case that members of certain social groups receive greater rewards per contribution than others. In this article, we draw on evolutionary game theory to show that the emergence of this sort of convention is far from surprising. In simple cultural evolutionary models, inequity is much (...) more likely to emerge than equity, despite the presence of stable, equitable outcomes that groups might instead learn. As we outline, social groups provide a way to break symmetry between actors in determining both contribution and reward in joint projects. (shrink)

[Toril] Moi says that my misunderstanding of Kristeva lies in taking the “semiotic process” 1 for the whole of “poetic language”: “He does not seem to have noticed Kristeva’s account of the symbolic, her repeated insistence that language—the signifying process—is the product of a dialectical interaction between the symbolic and the semiotic” . But how could I not notice what Kristeva herself reiterates over and over? Not notice that “textual practice is that most intense struggle toward death, which runs alongside (...) and is inseparable from the differentiated binding of its charge in a symbolic texture”—words I quoted on page 814 ? The reader will find in my essay many other statements to the same effect. I noticed, I noticed, but Moi did not notice I noticed. She’s so certain Kristeva’s book is difficult that she may underestimate the ability of others to grasp its essential points. But despite the pine-knot paroxysms of grotesqueness in the Englished version , Kristeva makes herself understood well enough through her sharp logicality and by dint of repetition. Calvin Bedient is professor of English at the University of California, Los Angeles. His most recent book is He Do the Police in Different Voices , a study of The Waste Land. (shrink)

We had thought that poetry was a grace beyond biology, except for the biomovements of dancers, athletes, or those we love most. We had thought it a contradictory “organic” perfection in the relatively staying realm of the symbolical. But, no, according to Kristeva’s theory, poetry is essentially antiformal—in fact, so profoundly antiaesthetic that the proper words for describing it are not beauty, inspiration, form, instinctive rightness, inevitability, or delicacy . Instead, it attracts terms drawn from politics and war: corruption, infiltration, (...) disruption, shatterings, negation, supplantation, and murder. Poetry is the chora’s guerrilla war against culture.According to Kristeva, poetry reverses the ritualistic theological sacrifice of the soma, a sacrifice subsequently exacted, like a sales tax, through the “thetic” element of discourse, its determinate articulations. For Kristeva, the “theologization of the thetic” is what culture is —and as such it has no fundamental right to be, since what is fundamental is the chora and not God. I refer here as throughout to the revolutionary Kristeva of the late sixties and early seventies, the Kristeva whose “we,” as she says in “My Memory’s Hyperbole,” was a putatively communist Parisian party for “permanent revolution.”4 Revolution in Poetic Language is a monumental, late end product of this phase of Kristeva’s thinking; indeed, there are signs that she had already surpassed it by the time the book was published. 4. See Kristeva, “My Memory’s Hyperbole,” trans. Athena Viscusi, in The Female Autograph: Theory and Practice of Autobiography from the Tenth to the Twentieth Century, ed. Domna C. Stanton , pp. 219-35. Calvin Bedient is professor of English at the University of California, Los Angeles. His most recent book is He Do the Police in Different Voices , a study of The Waste Land. (shrink)

Classic text considersgeneral theory of computability, computable functions, operations on computable functions, Turing machines self-applied, unsolvable decision problems, applications of general theory, mathematical logic, Kleene hierarchy, computable functionals, classification of unsolvable decision problems and more.