There is no subject to which the writers of ethical textbooks have devoted more attention than that of the relations between pleasure and desire, and yet it is surprising how little agreement their efforts have produced in philosophical circles. This failure seems to me to be chiefly due to the fact that the question is only one among the many problems of conation, and can only be discussed in that context. In consequence, there remains a very wide gap between what (...) psychologists have to say about the analysis of conation and what ethical writers have to say about the problems of moral psychology. 1 My object in writing this article is to help to bring this deplorable state of affairs to an end by expounding a theory of the relations between pleasure and desire, which is based upon a careful analysis of the facts of conation. (shrink)

The coefficients of internal consistency and retest reliability had been rarely investigated within the methodology of dream content analysis. Analyzing a dream series of elderly, healthy persons obtained from weekly telephone interviews, the internal consistency of a series of 20 dreams and retests after 4 or 22 weeks, respectively, had been computed. The findings indicate that dream recall and dream length are quite stable, but dream characteristics such as bizarreness and emotional tone underlie large intraindividual fluctuations. In order to obtain (...) reliable measures for these variables which will be important for correlational studies, including waking-life trait measures, one has to obtain as many dreams as possible in a very short time period. Further research is needed to extend the present findings to diary dreams and laboratory dreams. (shrink)

It is commonly held that there is no place for the 'now’ in physics, and also that the passing of time is something subjective, having to do with the way reality is experienced but not with the way reality is. Indeed, the majority of modern theoretical physicists and philosophers of physics contend that the passing of time is incompatible with modern physical theory, and excluded in a fundamental description of physical reality. This book provides a forceful rebuttal of such claims. (...) In successive chapters the author explains the historical precedents of the modern opposition to time flow, giving careful expositions of matters relevant to becoming in classical physics, the special and general theories of relativity, and quantum theory, without presupposing prior expertise in these subjects. Analysing the arguments of thinkers ranging from Aristotle, Russell, and Bergson to the proponents of quantum gravity, he contends that the passage of time, understood as a local becoming of events out of those in their past at varying rates, is not only compatible with the theories of modern physics, but implicit in them. (shrink)

Mario Bunge wrote his classic Causality and Modern Science more than 60 years ago, and a third revised edition was published by Dover in 1979. With its impressive scope and historical perspective it was a long way ahead of its time. But many of its insights still have not been sufficiently appreciated by physicists and philosophers alike. These include Bunge’s distinction between causation and other types of determination, his critique of the still-dominant Humean accounts of causality as leaving out the (...) productive aspect of determination, his critique of the conflation of determination with predictability, his insistence on the fictional character of isolated causal chains, and his demonstration that “causal connectability” depends only on the principle of retarded action, not causation. It will be argued that there is a degree of agreement between his views on determinism and causality and those of Leibniz, and a comparison between the two thinkers’ views is used to throw further light on these matters. (shrink)

This paper consists in a study of Leibniz’s argument for the infinite plurality of substances, versions of which recur throughout his mature corpus. It goes roughly as follows: since every body is actually divided into further bodies, it is therefore not a unity but an infinite aggregate; the reality of an aggregate, however, reduces to the reality of the unities it presupposes; the reality of body, therefore, entails an actual infinity of constituent unities everywhere in it. I argue that this (...) depends on a generalized notion of aggregation, according to which a thing may be an aggregate of its constituents if every one of its actual parts presupposes such constituents, but is not composed from them. One of the premises of this argument is the reality of bodies. If this premise is denied, Leibniz’s argument for the infinitude of substances, and even of their plurality, cannot go through. (shrink)

In contrast with some recent theories of infinitesimals as non-Archimedean entities, Leibniz’s mature interpretation was fully in accord with the Archimedean Axiom: infinitesimals are fictions, whose treatment as entities incomparably smaller than finite quantities is justifiable wholly in terms of variable finite quantities that can be taken as small as desired, i.e. syncategorematically. In this paper I explain this syncategorematic interpretation, and how Leibniz used it to justify the calculus. I then compare it with the approach of Smooth Infinitesimal Analysis, (...) as propounded by John Bell. I find some salient differences, especially with regard to higher-order infinitesimals. I illustrate these differences by a consideration of how each approach might be applied to propositions of Newton’s Principia concerning the derivation of force laws for bodies orbiting in a circle and an ellipse. “If the Leibnizian calculus needs a rehabilitation because of too severe treatment by historians in the past half century, as Robinson suggests (1966, 250), I feel that the legitimate grounds for such a rehabilitation are to be found in the Leibnizian theory itself.”—(Bos 1974–1975, 82–83). (shrink)

In Minkowski spacetime, because of the relativity of simultaneity to the inertial frame chosen, there is no unique world-at-an-instant. Thus the classical view that there is a unique set of events existing now in a three dimensional space cannot be sustained. The two solutions most often advanced are that the four-dimensional structure of events and processes is alone real, and that becoming present is not an objective part of reality; and that present existence is not an absolute notion, but is (...) relative to inertial frame; the world-at-an-instant is a three dimensional, but relative, reality. According to a third view, advanced by Robb, Capek and Stein, what is present at a given spacetime point is, strictly speaking, constituted by that point alone. I argue here against the first of these views that the four-dimensional universe cannot be said to exist now, already, or indeed at any time at all; so that talk of its existence or reality as if that precludes the existence or reality of the present is a non sequitur. The second view assumes that in relativistic physics time lapse is measured by the time co-ordinate function; against this I maintain that it is in fact measured by the proper time, as I argue by reference to the Twin Paradox. The third view, although formally correct, is tarnished by its unrealistic assumption of point-events. This makes it susceptible to paradox, and also sets it at variance with our normal intuitions of the present. I argue that a defensible concept of the present is nonetheless obtainable when account is taken of the non-instantaneity of events, including that of conscious awareness, as that region of spacetime comprised between the forward lightcone of the beginning of a small interval of proper time t and the backward lightcone of the end of that interval. This gives a serviceable notion of what is present to a given event of short duration, as well as saving our intuition of the “reality” or robustness of present events. (shrink)

In this paper I offer a fresh interpretation of Leibniz’s theory of space, in which I explain the connection of his relational theory to both his mathematical theory of analysis situs and his theory of substance. I argue that the elements of his mature theory are not bare bodies (as on a standard relationalist view) nor bare points (as on an absolutist view), but situations. Regarded as an accident of an individual body, a situation is the complex of its angles (...) and distances to other co-existing bodies, founded in the representation or state of the substance or substances contained in the body. The complex of all such mutually compatible situations of co-existing bodies constitutes an order of situations, or instantaneous space. Because these relations of situation change from one instant to another, space is an accidental whole that is continuously changing and becoming something different, and therefore a phenomenon. As Leibniz explains to Clarke, it can be represented mathematically by supposing some set of existents hypothetically (and counterfactually) to remain in a fixed mutual relation of situation, and gauging all subsequent situations in terms of transformations with respect to this initial set. Space conceived in terms of such allowable transformations is the subject of Analysis Situs. Finally, insofar as space is conceived in abstraction from any bodies that might individuate the situations, it encompasses all possible relations of situation. This abstract space, the order of all possible situations, is an abstract entity, and therefore ideal. (shrink)

It is well known that Leibniz advocated the actual infinite, but that he did not admit infinite collections or infinite numbers. But his assimilation of this account to the scholastic notion of the syncategorematic infinite has given rise to controversy. A common interpretation is that in mathematics Leibniz’s syncategorematic infinite is identical with the Aristotelian potential infinite, so that it applies only to ideal entities, and is therefore distinct from the actual infinite that applies to the actual world. Against this, (...) I argue in this paper that Leibniz’s actual infinite, understood syncategorematically, applies to any entities that are actually infinite in multitude, whether numbers, actual parts of matter, or monads. It signifies that there are more of them than can be assigned a number, but that there is no infinite number or collection of them, which notion involves a contradiction. Similarly, to say that a magnitude is actually infinitely small in the syncategorematic sense is to say that no matter how small a magnitude one takes, there is a smaller, but there are no actual infinitesimals. In geometry one may calculate with expressions apparently denoting such entities, on the understanding that they are fictions, standing for variable magnitudes that can be made arbitrarily small, so as to produce demonstrations that there is no error in the resulting expressions. (shrink)

Individual differences in phonological processing abilities have often been attributed to perceptual factors, rather than to factors relating to learning and memory. Here, we consider the contribution of individual differences in declarative and procedural memory to phonological processing performance in adulthood. We examined the phonological processing, declarative memory, and procedural memory abilities of 79 native English-speaking young adults with typical language and reading abilities. Declarative memory was assessed with a recognition memory task of real and made-up objects. Procedural memory was (...) assessed with a serial reaction time task. For both tasks, learning was assessed shortly after encoding, and again after a 12-h, overnight delay. We regressed phonological processing ability with memory performance on both days. We found that declarative memory, but not procedural memory, was highly predictive of phonological processing abilities. Specifically, declarative memory scores obtained shortly after learning were associated with non-word repetition performance, whereas declarative memory scores obtained after the overnight delay were associated with phonological awareness. Procedural memory was not associated with either of the phonological processing measures. We discuss these findings in the context of adult participants with mature phonological systems. We examine possible implications for the relationship between declarative memory and phonological processing in adulthood. (shrink)

Russell’s most important source for his book on Leibniz was C. I. Gerhardt’s seven-volume Die philosophischen Schriften von Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. Russell heavily annotated his copy of this important edition of Leibniz’s works. The present paper records all Russell’s marginalia, with the exception of passages marked merely by vertical lines in the margin, and provides explanatory commentary.