Here the philosopher and physicist David Z Albert argues, among other things, that the difference between past and future can be understood as a mechanical phenomenon of nature and that quantum mechanics makes it impossible to present the entirety of what can be said about the world as a narrative of “befores” and “afters.”.

Albert approaches critical rationalism as an alternative to other philosophical standpoints dominant in Germany: the conceptions of the Frankfurt School, hermeneutical thinking as represented by Gadamer, analytic philosophy, and logical empiricism. The author's purpose is to find a way out of the foundationalism of classical philosophy without falling back on the skeptical views so prevalent in today's philosophical thinking. Originally published in 1985. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from (...) the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905. (shrink)

Recent advances in natural language generation (NLG), such as public accessibility to ChatGPT, have sparked polarised debates about the societal impact of this technology. Popular discourse tends towards either overoptimistic hype that touts the radically transformative potentials of these systems or pessimistic critique of their technical limitations and general ‘stupidity’. Surprisingly, these debates have largely overlooked the exegetical capacities of these systems, which for many users seem to be producing meaningful texts. In this paper, we take an interdisciplinary approach that (...) combines hermeneutics—the study of meaning and interpretation—with prompt engineering—task descriptions embedded in input to NLG systems—to study the extent to which a specific NLG system, ChatGPT, produces texts of hermeneutic value. We design prompts with the goal of optimising hermeneuticity rather than mere factual accuracy, and apply them in four different use cases combining humans and ChatGPT as readers and writers. In most cases, ChatGPT produces readable texts that respond clearly to our requests. However, increasing the specificity of prompts’ task descriptions leads to texts with intensified neutrality, indicating that ChatGPT’s optimisation for factual accuracy may actually be detrimental to the hermeneuticity of its output. (shrink)

In this essay, we suggest practical ways to shift the framing of crisis standards of care toward disability justice. We elaborate on the vision statement provided in the 2010 Institute of Medicine (National Academy of Medicine) “Summary of Guidance for Establishing Crisis Standards of Care for Use in Disaster Situations,” which emphasizes fairness; equitable processes; community and provider engagement, education, and communication; and the rule of law. We argue that interpreting these elements through disability justice entails a commitment to both (...) distributive and recognitive justice. The disability rights movement's demand “Nothing about us, without us” requires substantive inclusion of disabled people in decision‐making related to their interests, including in crisis planning before, during, and after a pandemic like Covid‐19. (shrink)

Time magazine's "Man of the Century", Albert Einstein is the founder of modern physics and his theory of relativity is the most important scientific idea of the modern era. In this short book, Einstein explains, using the minimum of mathematical terms, the basic ideas and principles of the theory that has shaped the world we live in today. Unsurpassed by any subsequent books on relativity, this remains the most popular and useful exposition of Einstein's immense contribution to human knowledge. (...) With a new foreword by Derek Raine. (shrink)

_Time_'s 'Man of the Century', Albert Einstein is the unquestioned founder of modern physics. His theory of relativity is the most important scientific idea of the modern era. In this short book Einstein explains, using the minimum of mathematical terms, the basic ideas and principles of the theory which has shaped the world we live in today. Unsurpassed by any subsequent books on relativity, this remains the most popular and useful exposition of Einstein's immense contribution to human knowledge.

Many authors claim that being conscious constitutively involves being self-conscious, or conscious of oneself. This claim appears to be threatened by reports of ‘selfless’ episodes, or conscious episodes lacking self-consciousness, recently described in a number of pathological and nonpathological conditions. However, the credibility of these reports has in turn been challenged on the following grounds: remembering and reporting a past conscious episode as an episode that one went through is only possible if one was conscious of oneself while undergoing it. (...) Call this the Memory Challenge. This paper argues that the Memory Challenge fails to undermine the credibility to reports of selfless episodes, because it rests on problematic assumptions about episodic memory. The paper further argues that we should distinguish between several kinds of self-representation that may be involved in the process of episodic remembering, and that once we do so, it is no longer mysterious how one could accurately remember and report a selfless episode as an episode that one went through. Thus, we should take reports of this kind seriously, and view them as credible counter-examples to the claim that consciousness constitutively involves self-consciousness. (shrink)

In pluralist societies, stakeholders in healthcare may have different experiences of and moral perspectives on health, well-being, and good care. Increasing cultural, religious, sexual, and gender diversity among both patients and healthcare professionals requires healthcare organizations to address these differences. Addressing diversity, however, comes with inherent moral challenges; for example, regarding how to deal with healthcare disparities between minoritized and majoritized patients or how to accommodate different healthcare needs and values. Diversity statements are an important strategy for healthcare organizations to (...) define their normative ideas with respect to diversity and to establish a point of departure for concrete diversity approaches. We argue that healthcare organizations ought to develop diversity statements in a participatory and inclusive way in order to promote social justice. Furthermore, we maintain that clinical ethicists can support healthcare organizations in developing diversity statements in a more participatory way by fostering reflective dialogues through clinical ethics support. We will use a case example from our own practice to explore what such a developmental process may look like. We will critically reflect on the procedural strengths and challenges as well as on the role of the clinical ethicist in this example. (shrink)

_Time_'s 'Man of the Century', Albert Einstein is the unquestioned founder of modern physics. His theory of relativity is the most important scientific idea of the modern era. In this short book Einstein explains, using the minimum of mathematical terms, the basic ideas and principles of the theory which has shaped the world we live in today. Unsurpassed by any subsequent books on relativity, this remains the most popular and useful exposition of Einstein's immense contribution to human knowledge.

Relativity is the most important scientific idea of the twentieth century. Albert Einstein is the unquestioned founder of modern physics. His Special and General theories of Relativity introduced the idea to the world. In this classic short book he explains clearly, using the minimum amount of mathematical terms, the basic ideas and principles of his theory of Relativity. Unsurpassed by any subsequent books on Relativity, this remains the most popular and useful exposition of Einstein's immense contribution to human knowledge.

Albert and De Ruiter provide an introduction to the Conversation Analytic approach to ‘repair’: the ways in which people detect and deal with troubles in speaking, hearing and understanding in conversation. They explain the basic turn‐taking structures involved, provide examples, explain recent developments in the field and highlight some important points of contact and contrast with work in the Cognitive Sciences.

This paper challenges the traditional assumption that descriptive and prescriptive sciences are essentially distinct by presenting a study on the implicit normativity of the production and presentation of biomedical scientific facts within evidence-based medicine. This interdisciplinary study serves as an illustration of the potential worth of the concept of implicit normativity for bioethics in general and for integrated empirical ethics research in particular. It demonstrates how both the production and presentation of scientific information in an evidence-based decision-support contain implicit presuppositions (...) and values, which pre-structure the moral environment of the clinical process of decision-making. As a consequence, the evidence-based decision support did not only support the clinical decision-making process; it also transformed it in a morally significant way. This phenomenon undermines the assumption within much of the literature on patient autonomy that information disclosure is a conditional requirement before patient autonomy even starts; patient autonomy is already influenced during the production and presentation of information. These results imply an increased responsibility of those who produce and present evidence-based facts(i.e. scientists in general and physicians in particular). The insights of this study not only involve a different focus on both theory and practice of patient autonomy and informed consent, but they also call for a broader scope of morality than does traditional empirical research in bioethics. The concept of implicit normativity within integrated empirical ethics research calls for a strong cooperation between bioethicists and descriptive scientists, i.e., a cooperation that goes beyond the discipline-specific epistemic values and that takes place during all phases of the research process. (shrink)

In this paper we prove that the preordering $\lesssim $ of provable implication over any recursively enumerable theory $T$ containing a modicum of arithmetic is uniformly dense. This means that we can find a recursive extensional density function $F$ for $\lesssim $. A recursive function $F$ is a density function if it computes, for $A$ and $B$ with $A\lnsim B$, an element $C$ such that $A\lnsim C\lnsim B$. The function is extensional if it preserves $T$-provable equivalence. Secondly, we prove a (...) general result that implies that, for extensions of elementary arithmetic, the ordering $\lesssim $ restricted to $\Sigma_{n}$-sentences is uniformly dense. In the last section we provide historical notes and background material. (shrink)

From one of the world's most important and enduring minds, Albert Einstein's ideas, thoughts, and philosophies on the world and its people. Copyright © Libri GmbH. All rights reserved.

Quilty-Dunn et al. claim that all complex infant and animal reasoning implicate language-of-thought hypothesis (LOTH)-like structures. We agree with the authors that the mental life of animals can be explained in representationalist terms, but we disagree with their idea that the complexity of mental representations is best explained by appealing to abstract concepts, and instead, we explain that it doesn't need to.

Bringing expert knowledge to bear in an open and deliberative way to help solve pressing social problems is a major concern today, when technocratic and bureaucratic decision making often occurs with little or no input from the general public. Albert Dzur proposes an approach he calls “democratic professionalism” to build bridges between specialists in domains like law, medicine, and journalism and the lay public in such a way as to enable and enhance broader public engagement with and deliberation about (...) major social issues. Sparking a critical and constructive dialogue among social theories of the professions, professional ethics, and political theories of deliberative democracy, Dzur reveals interests, motivations, strengths, and vulnerabilities in conventional professional roles that provide guideposts for this new approach. He then applies it in examining three practical arenas in which experiments in collaboration and power-sharing between professionals and citizens have been undertaken: public journalism, restorative justice, and the bioethics movement. Finally, he draws lessons from these cases to refine this innovative theory and identify the kinds of challenges practitioners face in being both democratic and professional. (shrink)

We show that a consistent, finitely axiomatized, sequential theory cannot prove its own inconsistency on every definable cut. A corollary is that there are at least three degrees of global interpretability of theories equivalent modulo local interpretability to a consistent, finitely axiomatized, sequential theory U.

Hans Albert is the leading critical rationalist in the German-speaking world and the main critic of the hermeneutic tradition. He is well-known for applying the idea of critical reason to various kinds of human practice, including economics, politics, and law. But he has also improved on Popper's methodology by introducing the idea of rational heuristics. This collection of essays presents the core of his work on epistemology, philosophy of the social sciences, philosophy of religion, and philosophy of law. Most (...) of Albert's works have not been available in English. It is enormously useful to have these articles collected in a single volume. (shrink)

L'absurde, le suicide, etc. Premier essai philosophique (1942) de l'auteur. Indispensable (ou presque) à tout apprenti philosophe.

Universities in North America and Europe increasingly provide financial incentives to encourage collaboration between faculty in different disciplines, based on the premise that this yields more innovative and sophisticated research. Drawing from a wealth of empirical data, the contributors to Investigating Interdisciplinary Collaboration put that theory to the test. What they find reveals how interdisciplinarity is not living up to its potential, but also suggests how universities might foster more genuinely collaborative and productive research. Chapter 10 is available Open Access (...) here: https: //www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK395883/. (shrink)

The Routledge Handbook of Political Ecology presents a comprehensive and authoritative examination of the rapidly growing field of political ecology. Located at the intersection of geography, anthropology, sociology, and environmental history, political ecology is one of the most vibrant and conceptually diverse fields of inquiry into nature-society relations within the social sciences. The Handbook serves as an essential guide to this rapidly evolving intellectual landscape. With contributions from over 50 leading authors, the Handbook presents a systematic overview of political ecology's (...) origins, practices and core concerns, and aims to advance both ongoing and emerging debates. While there are numerous edited volumes, textbooks, and monographs under the heading 'political ecology,' these have tended to be relatively narrow in scope, either as collections of empirically based (mostly case study) research on a given theme, or broad overviews of the field aimed at undergraduate audiences. The Routledge Handbook of Political Ecology is the first systematic, comprehensive overview of the field. With authors from North and South America, Europe, Australia and elsewhere, the Handbook of Political Ecology provides a state of the art examination of political ecology; addresses ongoing and emerging debates in this rapidly evolving field; and charts new agendas for research, policy, and activism. The Routledge Handbook of Political Ecology introduces political ecology as an interdisciplinary academic field. By presenting a 'state of the art' examination of the field, it will serve as an invaluable resource for students and scholars. It not only critically reviews the key debates in the field, but develops them. (shrink)

In this paper we formulate a version of Second Incompleteness Theorem. The idea is that a sequential sentence has ‘consistency power’ over a theory if it enables us to construct a bounded interpretation of that theory. An interpretation of V in U is bounded if, for some n , all translations of V -sentences are U -provably equivalent to sentences of complexity less than n . We call a sequential sentence with consistency power over T a pro-consistency statement for T (...) . We study pro-consistency statements. We provide an example of a pro-consistency statement for a sequential sentence A that is weaker than an ordinary consistency statement for A . We show that, if A is $${{\sf S}^{1}_{2}}$$ , this sentence has some further appealing properties, specifically that it is an Orey sentence for EA . The basic ideas of the paper essentially involve sequential theories. We have a brief look at the wider environment of the results, to wit the case of theories with pairing. (shrink)

In his 1967 paper Vaught used an ingenious argument to show that every recursively enumerable first order theory that directly interprets the weak system VS of set theory is axiomatizable by a scheme. In this paper we establish a strengthening of Vaught's theorem by weakening the hypothesis of direct interpretability of VS to direct interpretability of the finitely axiomatized fragment VS2 of VS. This improvement significantly increases the scope of the original result, since VS is essentially undecidable, but VS2 has (...) decidable extensions. We also explore the ramifications of our work on finite axiomatizability of schemes in the presence of suitable comprehension principles. (shrink)

Our study finds that relative to firms managed by local CEOs, firms managed by CEOs who have returned from overseas (returnee CEOs) exhibit significantly higher audit fees. We also find this positive association to be stronger for returnee CEOs who manage firms with greater agency problems, have overseas experience in countries with better developed institutions, or have greater business knowledge. Further analyses indicate that firms managed by returnee CEOs tend to exhibit better financial reporting quality, lower propensities for financial fraud, (...) and fewer earnings restatements in subsequent years. In addition, firms managed by returnee CEOs are associated with greater internationalization and higher propensities for seasoned equity offerings (SEOs) than firms managed by local CEOs. Overall, our findings are most consistent with the conjecture that returnees tend to bring ethics and practices that ensure higher financial reporting quality back to their home countries. Our findings offer a plausible explanation that returnee talents could increase firm value. (shrink)

Probability theory is important not least because of its relevance for decision making, which also means: its relevance for the single case. The frequency theory of probability on its own is irrelevant in the single case. However, Howson and Urbach argue that Bayesianism can solve the frequentist's problem: frequentist-probability information is relevant to Bayesians. The present paper shows that Howson and Urbach's solution cannot work, and indeed that no Bayesian solution can work. There is no way to make frequentist probability (...) relevant. (shrink)

An homage to the men and women of science, and an exposition of Einstein's place in scientific history In this fascinating collection of articles and speeches, Albert Einstein reflects not only on the scientific method at work in his own theoretical discoveries, but also eloquently expresses a great appreciation for his scientific contemporaries and forefathers, including Johannes Kepler, Isaac Newton, James Clerk Maxwell, Max Planck, and Niels Bohr. While Einstein is renowned as one of the foremost innovators of modern (...) science, his discoveries uniquely his own, through his own words it becomes clear that he viewed himself as only the most recent in a long line of scientists driven to create new ways of understanding the world and to prove their scientific theories. Einstein's thoughtful examinations explain the "how" of scientific innovations both in his own theoretical work and in the scientific method established by those who came before him. This authorized Philosophical Library book features a new introduction by Neil Berger, PhD, and an illustrated biography of Albert Einstein, which includes rare photos and never-before-seen documents from the Albert Einstein Archives at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. "What place does the theoretical physicist's picture of the world occupy among all these possible pictures? It demands the highest possible standard of rigorous precision in the description of relations, such as only the use of mathematical language can give" -Albert Einstein, "Principles of Research" Albert Einstein (1879-1955) was born in Germany and became an American citizen in 1934. A world-famous theoretical physicist, he was awarded the 1921 Nobel Prize for Physics and is renowned for his Theory of Relativity. In addition to his scientific work, Einstein was an influential humanist who spoke widely about politics, ethics, and social causes. After leaving Europe, Einstein taught at Princeton University. His theories were instrumental in shaping the atomic age. Neil Berger, an associate professor emeritus of mathematics, taught at the University of Illinois at Chicago in the Mathematics, Statistics, and Computer Science department from 1968 until his retirement in 2001. He was the recipient of the first Monroe H. Martin Prize (1975), which is now awarded by the University of Maryland every five years for a singly authored outstanding applied mathematics research paper. He has published numerous papers and reviews in his fields of expertise, which include elasticity, tensor analysis, scattering theory, and fluid mechanics. (shrink)

The 1968 My Lai Massacre in South Vietnam and shocking events at Abu Graibh prison in Iraq in 2003 show that the behaviour of some in the American military has descended into barbarism. How strong is the military's commitment to avoiding misconduct and atrocity? This timely and compelling book asks critical questions and raises sobering issues the Australian Army can't ignore. Leading military personnel, aid workers, commentators and scholars discuss the Australian Army's commitment to behaving ethically and the challenges associated (...) with contemporary warfare. With chapters on social media and inciting violence, cyberweapons, and special operations and humanitarian deployments, 'Ethics Under Fire' offers a rare insight into the key issues facing the modern army, from technology and tactics to terrorism"--Back cover. (shrink)