Like _Beyond All Appearances_,_ _which it supplements, Paul Weiss’s new book is a fundamental work which faces all the hard issues which are not only at the heart of philosophy but at the core of our entire culture. Readers of Mr. Weiss’s phenomenology of religion will need no introduction to this new work which expands and clari­fies many of the issues raised in _Beyond All Appearances. _However, no knowl­edge of Paul Weiss’s previous books is required to understand and appreciate this (...) brilliant new exposition. Weiss’s plain style makes his ideas accessible to all intelligent readers, whether or not they have been trained as professional philosophers. Here in _First Considerations _Mr. Weiss addresses himself to such topics as actuality, internalization, evidence, names, substance, being, natures and possibilities, existence, unity and the cosmos—issues which have engrossed him as a moral philosopher and meta­physician throughout his distinguished career. In his progress through the ideas and issues expounded in this new book Mr. Weiss is concerned with the human condition distinctive of this species of ours. Rigorously applied, his moral philosophy is as complete and thorough as that of any of the major thinkers, and provides as complete a guide as, for example, that of Buddhism. A highly original work, no doubt well in advance of current trends in philosophy, _First Considerations _will provoke further thought and discussion and will be regarded as a seminal work in modern philosophical approaches. (shrink)

Professor Savage has been candid and generous in stating his interest in philosophy, and the philosophers who have heard him are surely grateful for this. His attitude is very far from that of some competent scientists and mathematicans who purport to clear up the questions which philosophers raise concerning their disciplines by means of a battery of technical results of varying relevance—a procedure which can often be appropriately described as “an abominable snow-job.” However, Professor Savage's generosity places a responsibility on (...) philosophers, since the questions he raises are difficult. (shrink)

H.P. Stapp has proposed a number of demonstrations of a Bell-type theorem which dispensed with an assumption of hidden variables, but relied only upon locality together with an assumption that experimenters can choose freely which of several incompatible observables to measure. In recent papers his strategy has centered upon counterfactual conditionals. Stapp’s paper in American Journal of Physics, 2004, replies to objections raised against earlier expositions of this strategy and proposes a simplified demonstration. The new demonstration is criticized, several subtleties (...) in the logic of counterfactuals are pointed out, and the proofs of J.S. Bell and his followers are advocated. (shrink)

Potentiality, Entanglement and Passion-at-a-Distance is a book for theoretical physicists and philosophers of modern physics. It treats a puzzling and provocative aspect of recent quantum physics: the apparent interaction of certain physical events that cannot share any causal connection. These are said to be `entangled' in some way, but an explanation remains elusive. Abner Shimony - to whom the book is dedicated - and others suggest the need to revive the category of what may be seen as a metaphysical (...) potentiality. Abner has described these events without actions to link them as `passion at a distance': not active, but passive. The discussions gathered here are written by a truly remarkable cast of scientists and philosophers and shed new light on the most profound puzzles of our times. (shrink)

Abner Shimony is one of the most eminent of present-day philosophers of science, whose work has exerted a profound influence in both the philosophy and physics communities. This two-volume 1993 collection of his essays written over a period of forty years explores the interrelations between science and philosophy. Shimony regards the knowing subject as an entity in nature whose faculties must be studied from the points of view of evolutionary biology and empirical psychology. He maintains that the twentieth century (...) is one of the great ages of metaphysics, given the deep implications of quantum mechanics, relativity theory and molecular biology. Nevertheless he rejects the thesis that mentality is entirely explicable in physical terms and argues that mind has a fundamental place in nature. Though distinguishing between values and scientifically established facts, Shimony holds that the sense of wonder cultivated by the natural sciences is one of the noblest of human values. (shrink)

Introduction -- Against political obligation -- Accommodating our plural obligations -- Against interpretive obligation to the past -- Against interpretive obligation to the Supreme Court.

Black-Body Theory and the Quantum Discontinuity, 1894-1912. Thomas S. Kuhn .

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work.This work is in the public domain in (...) the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work.As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

Noncontextual hidden variables theories, assigning simultaneous values to all quantum mechanical observables, are inconsistent by theorems of Gleason and others. These theorems do not exclude contextual hidden variables theories, in which a complete state assigns values to physical quantities only relative to contexts. However, any contextual theory obeying a certain factorisability conditions implies one of Bell's Inequalities, thereby precluding complete agreement with quantum mechanical predictions. The present paper distinguishes two kinds of contextual theories, ‘algebraic’ and ‘environmental’, and investigates when factorisability (...) is reasonable. Some statements by Fine about the philosophical significance of Bell's Inequalities are then assessed. (shrink)

An extremum principle was postulated by Horne, Finkelstein, Shull, Zeilinger, and Bernstein in order to derive the physically allowable parameters for sinusoidal standing waves governing a neutron in a crystal which is immersed in a strong external magnetic field: “the expectation value of the total potential 〈V〉 is an extremum.” We show that this extremum principle can be obtained from the variational principle used by Schrodinger to derive his nonrelativistic wave equation. We rederive the solutions found by the above-mentioned authors (...) as well as some additional solutions. (shrink)

A corollary of Gleason's theorem asserts that if the lattice of propositions of a physical system is isomorphic to the lattice of subspaces of a Hilbert space of dimension greater than two, then there is no probability measure that assigns only the values 1 and 0 (truth and falsity, respectively) to each of the propositions. Belinfante outlined an elegant geometrical proof of this corollary but relied upon an unrigorous measure-theoretical statement. An amplified geometrical proof is given along Belinfante's lines, but (...) dispensing with measure theory. (shrink)

A historical investigation of the exclusion of Africa and Asia from modern histories of philosophy.

Table of Contents: Acknowledgements; Preface; 1. Integral epistemology; 2. Reality, causality and closing the circle; 3. Search for a world view that can accommodate our knowledge of microphysics; 4. Perception from an evolutionary point of view; 5. Is observation theory-laden? A problem in naturalistic epistemology; 6. Coherence and the axioms of confirmation; 7. An adamite derivation of the principles of the calculus of probability; 8. The status of the principle of maximum entropy; 9. Scientific inference; 10. Reconsiderations on inductive logic; (...) 11. Comments on two epistemological these of Thomas Kuhn; 12. Comment on Martin Eger's A Tale of Two Controversies; Index. (shrink)

Recent studies indicate that mammalian chromosomes contain discretecis‐acting loci that control replication timing, mitotic condensation, and stability of entire chromosomes. Disruption of the large non‐coding RNA gene ASAR6 results in late replication, an under‐condensed appearance during mitosis, and structural instability of human chromosome 6. Similarly, disruption of the mouse Xist gene in adult somatic cells results in a late replication and instability phenotype on the X chromosome. ASAR6 shares many characteristics with Xist, including random mono‐allelic expression and asynchronous replication timing. (...) Additional “chromosome engineering” studies indicate that certain chromosome rearrangements affecting many different chromosomes display this abnormal replication and instability phenotype. These observations suggest that all mammalian chromosomes contain “inactivation/stability centers” that control proper replication, condensation, and stability of individual chromosomes. Therefore, mammalian chromosomes contain four types ofcis‐acting elements, origins, telomeres, centromeres, and “inactivation/stability centers”, all functioning to ensure proper replication, condensation, segregation, and stability of individual chromosomes. (shrink)

Many of the pioneers of quantum mechanics — notably Planck, Einstein, Bohr, de Broglie, Heisenberg, Schrodinger, Born, Jordan, Lande, Wigner, and London — were seriously concerned with philosophical questions. In each case one can ask a question of psychological and historical interest: was it a philosophical penchant which drew the investigator towards a kind of physics research which is linked to philosophy, or was it rather that the conceptual difficulties of fundamental physics pulled him willy-nilly into the labyrinth of philosophy? (...) I shall not undertake to discuss this question, but shall cite an opinion of Peter Bergmann, which I find congenial: he learned from Einstein that “the theoretical physicist is a philosopher in workingman’s clothes” ([1],q.v). (shrink)

If quantum mechanics is interpreted as an objective, complete, physical theory, applying to macroscopic as well as microscopic systems, then the linearity of quantum dynamics gives rise to the measurement problem and related problems, which cannot be solved without modifying the dynamics. Eight desiderata are proposed for a reasonable modified theory. They favor a stochastic modification rather than a deterministic non-linear one, but the spontaneous localization theories of Ghirardi et al. and Pearle are criticized. The intermittent fluorescence of a trapped (...) atom irradiated by two laser beams suggests a stochastic theory in which the locus of stochasticity is interaction between a material system and the electromagnetic vacuum. (shrink)

The theory of natural selection is a rich systematization of biological knowledge without a first principle. When formulations of a proposed principle of natural selection are examined carefully, each is seen to be exhaustively analyzable into a proposition about sources of fitness and a proposition about consequences of fitness. But whenever the fitness of an organic variety is well defined in a given biological situation, its sources are local contingencies together with the background of laws from disciplines other than the (...) theory of natural selection; and the consequences of fitness for the long range fate of organic varieties are essentially applications of probability theory. Hence there is no role and no need for a principle of the theory of natural selection, and any generalities that may hold in that theory are derivative rather than fundamental. (shrink)

A combination of methodological considerations and propositions about the causal structure of spacetime provides a reply to Fine's criticisms of the "factorizability requirement" used in several versions of Bell's theorem. His proposal of "action in harmony" is criticized. Experimental tests are proposed for both the "synchronization models" and the "prism models", which Fine has invented as loopholes to Bell's theorem. A theorem of Suppes and Zanotti which purports to show the impossibility of hidden variables is criticized. One of their crucial (...) premisses seems to be justifiable only if one accepts a Parmenidean metaphysics. (shrink)

The Society for the Advancement of the Scientific World Conception has done me a great honor by inviting me to be the Sixth Vienna Circle Lecturer. The invitation has also stirred some deep emotions. A central figure of the Vienna Circle, Rudolf Carnap, was my revered teacher of philosophy at the University of Chicago in 1948–9 and later an informal adviser when I wrote a doctoral thesis at Yale University on inductive logic, and he was a friend during those years (...) and thereafter. I was not a disciple, but Carnap did not demand discipleship as a condition for admission to his seminars or to his friendship. He seemed to be baffled by the fact that despite my interest in mathematical logic and theoretical physics I proclaimed myself a metaphysicician and had even published an article in the first issue of The Review of Metaphysics. Carnap formulated a “principle of tolerance” as a philosophical maxim concerning rules of language, but he practiced a human and highly moral version of the principle of tolerance in his profoundly liberal social commitments and in his relations with his students. If he were here tonight, I would wish for his tolerance of the lapses of rigor and the flights of speculation to which he would be exposed. (shrink)