The sky proclaimed Emerson is “the daily bread of the eyes.” Despite the apparent truth of this observation, we often fail to appreciate the complex canopy of air above and around us in considerations of environmental aesthetics and ecological awareness. I examine the sky and aerial phenomena that are bound to, closely allied with, or materially emergent from, this ocean of blue. In the process, I develop a perspective for thinking about some of the aesthetic characteristics and dimensions of this (...) realm. I show that understanding and appreciating the sky must attend to features related to ephemerality, protean colors, the lack of aclear and definite frame, and other non-anthropogenic qualities. I pay particular attention to explorations of horizontally-mobile clouds and, for the sake of contrast, vertically-originating snow by painters, poets, and philosophers who are able to express imaginative components of these phenomena and to reveal or vivify aspects that complement or complete the more realistic descriptions provided by natural scientists. The always-accessible and ever-fluctuating beauty of the sky offers the potential for deepening our daily experiences of and encounters with the elemental world in which we are sensually immersed and physicallyembedded. It also helps to offer an indirect rationale for respecting and protecting this vital other-than-human sphere. (shrink)

An early, very preliminary edition of this book was circulated in 1962 under the title Set-theoretical Structures in Science. There are many reasons for maintaining that such structures play a role in the philosophy of science. Perhaps the best is that they provide the right setting for investigating problems of representation and invariance in any systematic part of science, past or present. Examples are easy to cite. Sophisticated analysis of the nature of representation in perception is to be found already (...) in Plato and Aristotle. One of the great intellectual triumphs of the nineteenth century was the mechanical explanation of such familiar concepts as temperature and pressure by their representation in terms of the motion of particles. A more disturbing change of viewpoint was the realization at the beginning of the twentieth century that the separate invariant properties of space and time must be replaced by the space-time invariants of Einstein's special relativity. Another example, the focus of the longest chapter in this book, is controversy extending over several centuries on the proper representation of probability. The six major positions on this question are critically examined. Topics covered in other chapters include an unusually detailed treatment of theoretical and experimental work on visual space, the two senses of invariance represented by weak and strong reversibility of causal processes, and the representation of hidden variables in quantum mechanics. The final chapter concentrates on different kinds of representations of language, concluding with some empirical results on brain-wave representations of words and sentences. (shrink)