Some combinations of attitudes--of beliefs, credences, intentions, preferences, hopes, fears, and so on--do not fit together right: they are incoherent. A natural idea is that there are requirements of "structural rationality" that forbid us from being in these incoherent states. Yet a number of surprisingly difficult challenges arise for this idea. These challenges have recently led many philosophers to attempt to minimize or eliminate structural rationality, arguing that it is just a "shadow" of "substantive rationality"--that is, correctly responding to one's (...) reasons. -/- In *Fitting Things Together*, Alex Worsnip pushes back against this trend--defending the view that structural rationality is a genuine kind of rationality, distinct from and irreducible to substantive rationality, and tackling the most important challenges for this view. In so doing, he gives an original positive theory of the nature of coherence and structural rationality that explains how the diverse range of instances of incoherence can be unified under a general account, and how facts about coherence are normatively significant. He also shows how a failure to focus on coherence requirements as a distinctive phenomenon and distinguish them adequately from requirements of substantive rationality has led to confusion and mistakes in several substantive debates in epistemology and ethics. -/- Taken as a whole, Fitting Things Together provides the first sustained defense of the view that structural rationality is a genuine, autonomous, unified, and normatively significant phenomenon. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Generic Argument for Traditional Utilitarianism Mill's Proof of Utilitarianism (Straightforward Interpretation) Mill's Proof of Utilitarianism (One Alternative Interpretation) Mill's Proof of Utilitarianism (Another Alternative Interpretation).

Necessary Existence breaks ground on one of the deepest questions anyone ever asks: why is there anything? Pruss and Rasmussen present an original defence of the hypothesis that there is a necessarily existing being capable of providing an ultimate foundation for the existence of all things.

Jacobi held a position of unparalleled importance in late eighteenth and early nineteenth century intellectual history. This includes his role in bringing about the close of the Enlightenment, his central part in shaping the reception of Kant's philosophy and German idealism, and his influence on the development of Romanticism and existentialism.

This important philosophical reflection on love and sexuality from a broadly Christian perspective is aimed at philosophers, theologians, and educated Christian readers. Alexander R. Pruss focuses on foundational questions on the nature of romantic love and on controversial questions in sexual ethics on the basis of the fundamental idea that romantic love pursues union of two persons as one body. _One Body_ begins with an account, inspired by St. Thomas Aquinas, of the general nature of love as constituted by (...) components of goodwill, appreciation, and unitiveness. Different forms of love, such as parental, collegial, filial, friendly, fraternal, or romantic, Pruss argues, differ primarily not in terms of goodwill or appreciation but in terms of the kind of union that is sought. Pruss examines romantic love as distinguished from other kinds of love by a focus on a particular kind of union, a deep union as one body achieved through the joint biological striving of the sort involved in reproduction. Taking the account of the union that romantic love seeks as a foundation, the book considers the nature of marriage and applies its account to controversial ethical questions, such as the connection between love, sex, and commitment and the moral issues involving contraception, same-sex activity, and reproductive technology. With philosophical rigor and sophistication, Pruss provides carefully argued answers to controversial questions in Christian sexual ethics. "This is a terrific—really quite extraordinary—work of scholarship. It is quite simply the best work on Christian sexual ethics that I have seen. It will become the text that anyone who ventures into the field will have to grapple with—a kind of touchstone. Moreover, it is filled with arguments with which even secular writers on sexual morality will have to engage and come to terms." —_Robert P. George, Princeton University __ "_One Body_ is an excellent piece of philosophical-theological reflection on the nature of sexuality and marriage. This book has the potential to become a standard go-to text for professors and students working on sex ethics issues, whether in philosophy or theology, both for the richness of its arguments, and the scope of its coverage of cases. " — Christopher Tollefsen, University of South Carolina_ "Alexander Pruss here develops sound and humane answers to the whole range of main questions about human sexual and reproductive choices. His principal argument for the key answers is very different from the one I have articulated over the past fifteen years. But his argumentation is at every point attractively direct, careful, energetic in framing and responding to objections, and admirably attentive to realities and the human goods at stake." —_John Finnis, University of Oxford _. (shrink)

This article seeks a new way to conceptualise the ‘classic’ work in the history of science, and suggests that the use of publishing history might help avoid the antagonism which surrounded the literary canon wars. It concentrates on the widely acknowledged concept that the key to the classic work is the fact of its being read over a prolonged period of time. Continued reading implies that a work is able to remain relevant to later generations of readers, and, although some (...) of this depends upon the openness of the original text, much more depends on the actions of subsequent publishers and editors in repackaging the work for later audiences.This is illustrated through an examination of the long publishing history of William Paley’s Natural theology. Over the course of the century, Natural theology was read as a work of gentlemanly natural theology, as a work which could be used in a formal or informal education in science, and as a work of Christian apologetic. These transformations occurred because of the actions of the later publishers and editors who had to make the work suit the current interests of the literary marketplace. Comparisons are made to Constitution of man, Vestiges of the natural history of creation and Origin of species.Author Keywords: Classic; Canon; Publishing history; Natural theology; William Paley. (shrink)

This paper shares results from a pedagogical experiment that assigns undergraduates to “cheat” on a final class essay by requiring their use of text-generating AI software. For this assignment, students harvested content from an installation of GPT-2, then wove that content into their final essay. At the end, students offered a “revealed” version of the essay as well as their own reflections on the experiment. In this assignment, students were specifically asked to confront the oncoming availability of AI as a (...) writing tool. What are the ethics of using AI this way? What counts as plagiarism? What are the conditions, if any, we should place on AI assistance for student writing? And how might working with AI change the way we think about writing, authenticity, and creativity? While students (and sometimes GPT-2) offered thoughtful reflections on these initial questions, actually composing with GPT-2 opened their perspectives more broadly on the ethics and practice of writing with AI. In this paper, I share how students experienced those issues, connect their insights to broader conversations in the humanities about writing and communication, and explain their relevance for the ethical use and evaluation of language models. (shrink)

Internalism about a person's good is roughly the view that in order for something to intrinsically enhance a person's well-being, that person must be capable of caring about that thing. I argue in this paper that internalism about a person's good should not be believed. Though many philosophers accept the view, Connie Rosati provides the most comprehensive case in favor of it. Her defense of the view consists mainly in offering five independent arguments to think that at least some form (...) of internalism about one's good is true. But I argue that, on closer inspection, not one of these arguments succeeds. The problems don't end there, however. While Rosati offers good reasons to think that what she calls 'two-tier internalism' would be the best way to formulate the intuition behind internalism about one's good, I argue that two-tier internalism is actually false. In particular, the problem is that no substantive theory of well-being is consistent with two-tier internalism. Accordingly, there is reason to think that even the best version of internalism about one's good is in fact false. Thus, I conclude, the prospects for internalism about a person's good do not look promising. (shrink)

The essence and basic methods of the pure theory -- The state and the law -- Law and its "others" : natural law, morality and social policy -- Constitution and normative hierarchy -- The basic norm and efficacy of the legal system -- The rule of law -- Conclusion -- Index.

Introduction -- What is personal responsibility? -- Ordinary language -- Common conceptions -- What do philosophers mean by responsibility? -- Personally responsible for what? -- What do philosophers think? part I -- Causes -- Capacity -- Control -- Choice versus brute luck -- Second-order attitudes -- Equality of opportunity -- Deservingness -- Reasonableness -- Reciprocity -- Equal shares -- Combining criteria -- What do philosophers think? part II -- Utility -- Self-respect -- Autonomy -- Human flourishing -- Natural duties and (...) special obligations -- A matter of perspectives -- Combining values -- What do politicians think? -- A brief typology -- International comparisons -- Welfare reform -- Healthcare reform -- Rights and responsibilities -- On the responsibilities of politicians -- What do ordinary people think? -- Why ask? -- Attitudes to welfare claimants -- When push comes to shove -- Perceptions and reality -- Further international comparisons -- The trouble with opinion surveys -- Four contemporary issues in focus -- Unemployment -- Health -- Drug abuse -- Personal debt and financial rewards -- So how do we decide? -- Getting the public involved -- Citizens juries -- Answering some potential criticisms. (shrink)

With any structural inference rule A/B, we associate the rule $${(A \lor p)/(B \lor p)}$$, providing that formulas A and B do not contain the variable p. We call the latter rule a join-extension ( $${\lor}$$ -extension, for short) of the former. Obviously, for any intermediate logic with disjunction property, a $${\lor}$$ -extension of any admissible rule is also admissible in this logic. We investigate intermediate logics, in which the $${\lor}$$ -extension of each admissible rule is admissible. We prove that (...) any structural finitary consequence operator (for intermediate logic) can be defined by a set of $${\lor}$$ -extended rules if and only if it can be defined through a set of well-connected Heyting algebras of a corresponding quasivariety. As we exemplify, the latter condition is satisfied for a broad class of algebraizable logics. (shrink)

Essentialism as applied to individuals is the claim that for at least some individuals there are properties that those individuals possess essentially. What it is to possess a property essentially is a matter of debate. To possess a property essentially is often taken to be akin to possessing a property necessarily, but stronger, although this is not a feature of Aristotle’s essentialism, according to which essential properties are those thing could not lose without ceasing to exist. Kit Fine (1994) takes (...) essential properties to be those that an object has in virtue of its identity, while other essentialists refer (as Fine also does) to the nature of an object as the source of its essential properties. It is sometimes important to distinguish the essential properties of a thing and the ‘full’ essence of a thing. The latter is the set of the essential properties of a thing, when that set necessarily suffices to determine the thing’s identity. One might hold that something has essential properties without agreeing that it has an identity-determining essence. Essentialism was largely in abeyance during the first two thirds of the twentieth century thanks to the domination of analytic philosophy by anti-metaphysical logical empiricism and the linguistic turn. The rehabilitation of essentialism owes much to the development of a formal apparatus for the understanding of modality more generally, thanks to C. I. Lewis, Ruth Barcan Marcus, and Saul Kripke. Kripke’s discussion of essentialism both about individuals and also about about natural kinds brought essentialism to wider philosophical prominence. Natural kind essentialism, which finds its modern genesis also in the work of Hilary Putnam, claims that natural kinds have essential properties: to say that possession of property P is is part of the essence of the kind K implies that, necessarily, every member or sample of the kind K possesses P. Essentialism about individuals has been linked to thinking about natural kinds by the contentious claim that one of the essential properties of any entity is that it belongs to the natural kind (or kinds) it actually belongs to. In this chapter I shall first outline certain claims and arguments concerning essentialism concerning individuals (Section 2).. (shrink)

Mental causation is notoriously threatened by the causal exclusion argument. A prominent strategy to save mental causation from causal exclusion consists in subscribing to an interventionist account of causation. This move has, however, recently been challenged by several authors. In this paper, we do two things: We (i) develop what we consider to be the strongest version of the interventionist causal exclusion argument currently on the market and (ii) propose a new way how it can in principle be overcome. In (...) particular, we propose to replace strict supervenience in the assumption that the mental supervenes on the physical by probabilistic supervenience and show how this move has the potential to license the inference to mental causation. Finally, we argue that probabilistic supervenience captures some of the most important intuitions that strict supervenience captures and discuss possible objections to weakening strict supervenience in the way we suggest. (shrink)

Can philosophy be a source of hope? Today it is common to believe that the answer is no - that providing hope, if it is possible at all, belongs either to the predictive sciences or to religion. In this exciting and simulating book, however, Alexander Douglas argues that the philosophy of Spinoza can offer something akin to religious hope. Douglas shows how Spinoza is able, without appealing to belief in any traditional afterlife or supernatural grace, to develop a profound (...) and original theory of how humans can escape from the conditions of death and sin. Douglas argues that this theory of escape, which Spinoza calls beatitude, is the centrepiece of his entire philosophy, though scholars have often downplayed or ignored it. One reason for this scholarly neglect might be the difficulty of understanding Spinoza's theory, which departs from the standard doctrines and methods of Western philosophy. Douglas's interpretation therefore seeks inspiration beyond the Western tradition, drawing especially on the classical Daoist text Zhuangzi and its commentaries. Here, Douglas argues, surprising resonances with Spinoza's core ideas can be found, leading to a new way of understanding his strange yet compelling theory of beatitude. (shrink)

International regulation of autonomous weapon systems (AWS) is increasingly conceived as an exercise in risk management. This requires a shared approach for assessing the risks of AWS. This paper presents a structured approach to risk assessment and regulation for AWS, adapting a qualitative framework inspired by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). It examines the interactions among key risk factors—determinants, drivers, and types—to evaluate the risk magnitude of AWS and establish risk tolerance thresholds through a risk matrix informed by (...) background knowledge of event likelihood and severity. Further, it proposes a methodology to assess community risk appetite, emphasizing that such assessments and resulting tolerance levels should be determined through deliberation in a multistakeholder forum. The paper highlights the complexities of applying risk-based regulations to AWS internationally, particularly the challenge of defining a global community for risk assessment and regulatory legitimization. (shrink)

Scotland has played an immense role in European high culture through the centuries, and among its cultural links none have been greater than those with France. This book shows that the links with France stretch back deep into the Middle Ages, and continue without a break into the 18th century, the Age of Enlightenment.

Several current theories have essences as primary drivers of inductive potential: e.g., people infer dogs share properties because they share essences. We investigated the possibility that people take occupational roles as having robust inductive potential because of a different source: their position in stable social institutions. In Studies 1–4, participants learned a novel property about a target, and then decided whether two new individuals had the property (one with the same occupation, one without). Participants used occupational roles to robustly generalize (...) rights and obligations, functional behaviors, personality traits, and skills. In Studies 5–6, we contrasted occupational roles (via label) with race/gender (via visual face cues). Participants reliably favored occupational roles over race/gender for generalizing rights and obligations, functional behaviors, personality traits, and skills (they favored race/gender for inferring leisure behaviors and physiological properties). Occupational roles supported inferences to the same extent as animal categories (Studies 4 and 6). In Study 7, we examined why members of occupational roles share properties. Participants did not attribute the inductive potential of occupational roles to essences, they attributed it to social institutions. In combination, these seven studies demonstrate that any theory of inductive potential must pluralistically allow for both essences and social institutions to form the basis of inductive potential. (shrink)

Writing in the cosmopolitan metropolis of Baghdad, Alfarabi (870-950) is unique in the history of premodern political philosophy for his extensive discussion of the nation, or Umma in Arabic. The term Umma may be traced back to the Qur'ān and signifies, then and now, both the Islamic religious community as a whole and the various ethnic nations of which that community is composed, such as the Turks, Persians, and Arabs. Examining Alfarabi's political writings as well as parts of his logical (...) commentaries, his book on music, and other treatises, Alexander Orwin contends that the connections and tensions between ethnic and religious Ummas explored by Alfarabi in his time persist today in the ongoing political and cultural disputes among the various nationalities within Islam. According to Orwin, Alfarabi strove to recast the Islamic Umma as a community in both a religious and cultural sense, encompassing art and poetry as well as law and piety. By proposing to acknowledge and accommodate diverse Ummas rather than ignoring or suppressing them, Alfarabi anticipated the contemporary concept of "Islamic civilization," which emphasizes culture at least as much as religion. Enlisting language experts, jurists, theologians, artists, and rulers in his philosophic enterprise, Alfarabi argued for a new Umma that would be less rigid and more creative than the Muslim community as it has often been understood, and therefore less inclined to force disparate ethnic and religious communities into a single mold. Redefining the Muslim Community demonstrates how Alfarabi's judicious combination of cultural pluralism, religious flexibility, and political prudence could provide a blueprint for reducing communal strife in a region that continues to be plagued by it today. (shrink)

Das Bild vom glaubwürdigen Wissenschaftler? vom Universalgelehrten der Renaissance zu modernen Laborspezialist*innen - ist ein kulturelles Konstrukt, das die Ansprüche seiner Zeit widerspiegelt. Wie es entsteht, wird im Galvanismusdiskurs um 1800 deutlich.Dieser Band beschäftigt sich mit den Fragen: Wer gilt um 1800 als Naturwissenschaftler? Wie findet man als junger Forscher Aufnahme in die wissenschaftliche Gemeinschaft? Und worin manifestieren sich die wissenschaftskulturellen Unterschiede in Deutschland und Großbritannien zu Beginn des 19. Jahrhunderts? Anhand der frühen Publikationen der jungen aufstrebenden Naturforscher Alexander (...) von Humboldt, Johann Wilhelm Ritter und Christian Heinrich Pfaff sowie ihrer britischen Kollegen untersucht der Autor die Konstruktion vom modernen Naturwissenschaftler durch die wissenschaftliche Gemeinschaft. (shrink)

The posterior cortex, hippocampus, and prefrontal cortex in the Leabra architecture are specialized in terms of various neural parameters, and thus are predilections for learning and processing, but domain-general in terms of cognitive functions such as face recognition. Also, these areas are not encapsulated and violate Fodorian criteria for modularity. Anderson's terminology obscures these important points, but we applaud his overall message.

Lazarus Revived shows how two thought experiments provide the foundation for arguments for the existence of conscious life after death. The theories of pluriverses and the Big Bang are examined and a substitute equation for E=MC² is presented.

Western societies today are coming unmoored in the face of an earth-shaking ethical and cultural paradigm shift. At its core is the question of what it means to be human and how we are meant to live. The old answers are no longer accepted; a dizzying array of options are offered in their stead. Underpinning this smorgasbord of lifestyles is a thicket of unquestioned assumptions, such as the separation of gender from biological sex, which not so long ago would have (...) been universally rejected as radical notions. In the spring of 2019, a group of Orthodox Christian scholars drawn from a wide variety of academic disciplines met together to offer responses to the moral crisis our generation faces, elaborating upon its various forms and facilitating a fuller understanding of some of its theological and philosophical foundations. In doing so they offer support to all those who question the claims that are so forcefully insisted upon today--a clarity that will aid them in standing up and resisting trends that have already shown to be the cause of great suffering and unhappiness. (shrink)

Hyperlogic is a hyperintensional system designed to regiment metalogical claims (e.g., “Intuitionistic logic is correct” or “The law of excluded middle holds”) into the object language, including within embedded environments such as attitude reports and counterfactuals. This paper is the first of a two-part series exploring the logic of hyperlogic. This part presents a minimal logic of hyperlogic and proves its completeness. It consists of two interdefined axiomatic systems: one for classical consequence (truth preservation under a classical interpretation of the (...) connectives) and one for “universal” consequence (truth preservation under any interpretation). The sequel to this paper explores stronger logics that are sound and complete over various restricted classes of models as well as languages with hyperintensional operators. (shrink)

In the last two decades there has been a meteoric rise of international criminal tribunals and courts and also a strengthening chorus of critics against them. Today it is hard to find strong defenders of international criminal tribunals and courts. This book attempts such a defense against an array of critics. It offers a nuanced defense, accepting many criticisms but arguing that the idea of international criminal tribunals can be defended as providing the fairest way to deal with mass atrocity (...) crimes in a global arena. Fairness and moral legitimacy will be at the heart of this defense. The authors take up the economic and political arguments that have been powerfully expressed, as well as arguments about sovereignty, punishment, responsibility, and evidence; but in the end they show that these arguments do not defeat the idea of international criminal courts and tribunals. (shrink)

The article reconstructs and critically discusses the energetic metaphysics of Dimitar Vatsov, which may be regarded as an important event in the philosophical life in Bulgaria. The article consists of two parts. The first part situates Vatsov's project in the context of the contemporary development of metaphysics and presents the evolution and logic of its realization, emphasizing the central ideas of actuality, energy, and codification. The second part presents a series of critical observations on the realization of the project, related (...) to conceptual ambiguities and problematic theoretical moves. It is argued that the modal aspects of energetic metaphysics need conceptual clarification and theoretical justification. The article also aims to provoke a broader discussion on the state and future of metaphysical research in Bulgarian philosophy. (shrink)

Hate speech law can be found throughout the world. But it is also the subject of numerous principled arguments, both for and against. These principles invoke a host of morally relevant features and practical considerations . The book develops and then critically examines these various principled arguments. It also attempts to de-homogenize hate speech law into different clusters of laws/regulations/codes that constrain uses of hate speech, so as to facilitate a more nuanced examination of the principled arguments. Finally, it argues (...) that it is morally fitting for judicial and legislative judgments about the overall warrant of hate speech law to reflect principled compromise. Principled compromise is characterized not merely by compromise over matters of principled concern but also by compromise which is itself governed by ideals of moral duty or civic virtue. (shrink)

Can Covid-19 vaccines be used off-label? Should they be? These were questions on the minds of parents, pediatricians, and the media when the FDA fully approved the Pfizer-BioNTech Covid-19 vaccine for people aged 16 and up. Yet the American Academy of Pediatrics cautioned against pediatric off-label use of the vaccine, and the CDC Covid-19 Vaccine Provider Agreement appears to prohibit it. After briefly contextualizing ethical and legal precedents regarding off-label use, we offer an analysis of the ethical permissibility of and (...) considerations for pediatric off-label Covid-19 vaccination based on individual benefits, risks, and available alternatives. Our analysis challenges the ethics of a blanket prohibition on off-label pediatric Covid-19 vaccination, as it limits clinician ability to provide care they may determine to be clinically and ethically appropriate. At the same time, our analysis acknowledges that Covid-19 creates population-level ethical considerations that are at times in tension with individual health interests. (shrink)

Ellen Ripley stands out from the ordinary, stereotypical women in horror and science fiction movies up until the release of Alien in 1979. It isn't hard to interpret Ripley's fight against the Xenomorphs as a metaphor for the feminist struggle against sexual violence directed at women, or to see her actions as violent opposition to those who would deny her sexual self‐determination. Proponents of care‐focused approaches observe that women have a special way of moral reasoning, whereas status‐oriented thinkers seek to (...) overcome gender‐based inequalities and unjust social relationships through criticizing status differences between men and women, like stereotypes and differences in pay for the same work. Two brief examples from Aliens illustrate the difference between these approaches. This chapter considers whether Ripley exercises a feminist ethics of care. In the last scene of Alien, Ripley's strong identification with her professional role shows itself again when she makes a final entry in the Nostromo's log. (shrink)

Kennedy (Linguist Philos 30:1–45, 2007) forcefully proposes what is now a widely assumed semantics for absolute gradable adjectives. On this semantics, maximum standard adjectives like “straight” and “dry” ascribe a maximal degree of the underlying quantity. Meanwhile, minimum standard adjectives like “bent” and “wet” merely ascribe a non-zero, non-minimal degree of the underlying quantity. This theory clashes with the ordinary intuition that sentences like “The stick is straight” are frequently true while sentences like “The stick is bent” are frequently informative, (...) and fans of the indicated theory of absolute gradable adjectives appeal to loose talk in response. One goal of this paper is to show that all extant theories of loose talk are inconsistent with this response strategy. Another goal is to offer a revised version of Hoek’s (Philos Rev 127:151–196, 2018, in: Proceedings of the 22nd Amsterdam Colloquium, 2019) recent theory of loose talk that accommodates absolute gradable adjectives after all, while being defensible against a range of important concerns. (shrink)

In this article, I consider the possibilities and limitations for testimonial justice in an international criminal courtroom. I begin by exploring the relationship between epistemology and criminal law, and consider how testimony contributes to the goals of truth and justice. I then assess the susceptibility of international criminal courts to the two harms of testimonial injustice: epistemic harm to the speaker, and harm to the truth-seeking process. I conclude that international criminal courtrooms are particularly susceptible to perpetrating testimonial injustice. Hearers (...) in the international criminal courtroom should practice testimonial justice, but the institution is not structured in a way that can prevent every instance of testimonial injustice. (shrink)

Scoring rules measure the deviation between a forecast, which assigns degrees of confidence to various events, and reality. Strictly proper scoring rules have the property that for any forecast, the mathematical expectation of the score of a forecast p by the lights of p is strictly better than the mathematical expectation of any other forecast q by the lights of p. Forecasts need not satisfy the axioms of the probability calculus, but Predd et al. [9] have shown that given a (...) finite sample space and any strictly proper additive and continuous scoring rule, the score for any forecast that does not satisfy the axioms of probability is strictly dominated by the score for some probabilistically consistent forecast. Recently, this result has been extended to non-additive continuous scoring rules. In this paper, a condition weaker than continuity is given that suffices for the result, and the condition is proved to be optimal. (shrink)

Volume 20, Issue 8, August 2020, Page 76-78.

This biography of the famous Soviet physicist Leonid Isaakovich Mandelstam (1889-1944), who became a Professor at Moscow State University in 1925, describes his contributions to both physics and technology, as well as discussing the scientific community which formed around him, usually called the Mandelstam school. Mandelstam's life story is thereby placed in its proper cultural context. The following more general issues are taken under consideration: the impact of German scientific culture on Russian science; the problems and fates of Russian intellectuals (...) during the revolutionary and post-revolutionary years; the formation of the Soviet Academy of Sciences; and transformation of the system of higher education in the USSR during the 1920's and 1930's.The author shows that Mandelstam's fundamental writings and his lectures notes allow to reconstruct his philosophy of science and his approach to the social and ethical functions of science and science education. That reconstruction is enhanced through extensive use of hitherto unpublished archival material as well as the transcripts of personal interviews conducted by the author. (shrink)

This biography of the famous Soviet physicist Leonid Isaakovich Mandelstam (1889-1944), who became a Professor at Moscow State University in 1925, describes his contributions to both physics and technology, as well as discussing the scientific community which formed around him, usually called the Mandelstam school. Mandelstam's life story is thereby placed in its proper cultural context. The following more general issues are taken under consideration: the impact of German scientific culture on Russian science; the problems and fates of Russian intellectuals (...) during the revolutionary and post-revolutionary years; the formation of the Soviet Academy of Sciences; and transformation of the system of higher education in the USSR during the 1920's and 1930's.The author shows that Mandelstam's fundamental writings and his lectures notes allow to reconstruct his philosophy of science and his approach to the social and ethical functions of science and science education. That reconstruction is enhanced through extensive use of hitherto unpublished archival material as well as the transcripts of personal interviews conducted by the author. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that we can understand incommensurability in a naturalistic, psychological manner. Cognitive habits can be acquired and so differ between individuals. Drawing on psychological work concerning analogical thinking and thinking with schemata, I argue that incommensurability arises between individuals with different cognitive habits and between groups with different shared cognitive habits.

Empiriomonism is Alexander Bogdanov's monistic philosophy of being and cognition, which he believed is consistent with both modern science and Marxism. In Books One and Two of Empiriomonism, Bogdanov begins with Ernst Mach's and Richard Avenarius's neutral monism - the idea that the 'physical' and the 'psychical' are two sides of one reality - and explains how human psyches are causally interconnected with the rest of nature. In Book Three, he shows how empiriomonism substantiates the principles of historical materialism (...) more adequately than G.V. Plekhanov's out-dated materialism. Bogdanov concludes that empiriomonism, although not technically materialist, is nevertheless of the same order as materialist systems and, since it is the ideology of the productive forces of society, it is a Marxist philosophy. (shrink)