An overview of the history of the concept of matter highlights the fact that alternative modes of explanation were successively employed. With the discovery of irrational numbers the initial conviction of the Pythagorean School collapsed and was replaced by an exploration of space as a principle of understanding. This legacy dominated the medieval period and had an after-effect well into modernity—for both Descartes and Kant still characterized matter in spatial terms. However, even before Galileo the mechanistic world view slowly entered (...) the scene—the world as chaos, particles in motion. Elevating movement to become the guiding principle in our understanding of matter dominated the main tendency of modern physics until the (end of the) 19th century. The discovery of irreversible processes (radio-activity for example) directed 20th century physics towards an exploration of the meaning of energy-operation. It turned out that even within 20th century physics long-standing legacies prevailed, because an account of the nature of matter continued to be torn apart by atomistic and holistic views—confronted by the problem of constancy and change (radical transformability versus persistence). Concrete, material reality exceeds the scope of any single mode of explanation—an insight that also serves a better understanding of the wave-particle duality. (shrink)

Analytische annotatie: Rechtsfilosofische beschouwing.

This comment calls attention to the nature of the Aristotelian and classical logics, and the difficulty of representing their judgments and inferences by means of Venn diagrams. The meaning of ‘all’ in the different calculi produces problems. A second problem is that the specification of existence in Venn diagrams for statements and arguments cannot be restricted to a single class, overlooked by Wiebe. This problem is further complicated by his adoption of classical (Renaissance) syllogistic, which is inconsistent. Aristotle’s term logic (...) is consistent. So also is the medieval extension, though the inclusion of singular premisses renders it less perspicuous though more flexible. (shrink)

Austin's lecture on this topic contributes little to the problem of freedom of the will, and so in my discussion of his ideas I shall stop short of the difficult part of that problem. His most important positive suggestion is that hypotheticals should be divided into two classes, conditionals and pseudo-conditionals. He claims that neglect of this distinction has been the cause of mistakes in certain forms of the dispositional analysis of the statement that an agent could have acted otherwise, (...) and he then goes on to criticise all forms of that analysis using arguments which do not depend on the difference between the two kinds of hypothetical.This discussion will be in two parts. In the first I shall take up Austin's distinction between conditionals and pseudos and criticise it and develop it at length, because it seems to me to be the most important thing in his lecture. Since I shall not have space for comment on fortuitous errors made by defenders of the dispositional analysis of the claim that an agent could have acted otherwise, I shall concentrate on the essential features of that analysis. (shrink)

I have argued in other work that emotion, attentional functions, and executive functions are three interpenetrant global state variables, essentially differential slices of the consciousness pie. This paper will outline the columnar architecture and connectivities of the PAG (periaqueductal gray), its role in organizing prototype states of emotion, and the re-entry of PAG with the extended reticular thalamic activating system (“ERTAS”). At the end we will outline some potential implications of these connectivities for possible functional correlates of PAG networks that (...) are just starting to be mapped. Overall, we will look at many lines of evidence that PAG should be conceptualized as a peri-reticular structure that has a foundational role in emotion, in generating the meaningful organization of behavior by the brain through prototype emotional states, and in allowing the various emotional systems to globally influence and tune both the forebrain and brainstem. Finally, we address implications of these concepts for what is currently understood about consciousness, underlining the need for somewhat more humility within consciousness studies about our current level of understanding of consciousness in the brain, combined with a deeper appreciation of the intrinsic connections between emotion and consciousness. One hopes that more concerted empirical interest in structures underneath the thalamus, combined with a deeper appreciation for the fundamental role that organismic and social value must have in bootstrapping awareness in the developing brain, would begin more widely to influence the fundamental lines of neuroscientific research in both emotion studies and consciousness studies. (shrink)

Since the discovery of incommensurability in ancient Greece, arithmeticism and geometricism constantly switched roles. After ninetieth century arithmeticism Frege eventually returned to the view that mathematics is really entirely geometry. Yet Poincaré, Brouwer, Weyl and Bernays are mathematicians opposed to the explication of the continuum purely in terms of the discrete. At the beginning of the twenty-first century ‘continuum theorists’ in France (Longo, Thom and others) believe that the continuum precedes the discrete. In addition the last 50 years witnessed the (...) revival of infinitesimals (Laugwitz and Robinson—non-standard analysis) and—based upon category theory—the rise of smooth infinitesimal analysis and differential geometry. The spatial whole-parts relation is irreducible (Russell) and correlated with the spatial order of simultaneity. The human imaginative capacities are connected to the characterization of points and lines (Euclid) and to the views of Aristotle (the irreducibility of the continuity of a line to its points), which remained in force until the ninetieth century. Although Bolzano once more launched an attempt to arithmetize continuity, it appears as if Weierstrass, Cantor and Dedekind finally succeeded in bringing this ideal to its completion. Their views are assessed by analyzing the contradiction present in Grünbaum’s attempt to explain the continuum as an aggregate of unextended elements (degenerate intervals). Alternatively a line-stretch is characterized as a one-dimensional spatial subject, given at once in its totality (as a whole) and delimited by two points—but it is neither a breadthless length nor the (shortest) distance between two points. The overall aim of this analysis is to account for the uniqueness of discreteness and continuity by highlighting their mutual interconnections exemplified in the nature of a line as a one-dimensional spatial subject, while acknowledging that points are merely spatial objects which are always dependent upon an extended spatial subject. Instead of attempting to reduce continuity to discreteness or discreteness to continuity, a third alternative is explored: accept the irreducibility of number and space and then proceed by analyzing their unbreakable coherence. The argument may be seen as exploring some implications of the view of John Bell, namely that the “continuous is an autonomous notion, not explicable in terms of the discrete.” Bell points out that initially Brouwer, in his dissertation of 1907, “regards continuity and discreteness as complementary notions, neither of which is reducible to each other.”. (shrink)

THE LEFT AND RIGHTS: A CONCEPTUAL ANALYSIS OF SOCIALIST RIGHTS by Tom Campbell Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1983. 296 pp., $12.95 Campbell's attempt to construct a socialist version of rights and the rule of law fails because it does not draw on individualism. Campbell's positive rights are ineffective barrien to both the schemes of Utopian visionaries who command political authority and more mundane sources of the abuse of power. He leaves unanswered the question of who will determine the extent (...) of the ?needs?; that would constitute socialist rights, in the absence of unlimited resources to fulfill them. And his rejection of individualism ¡eaves him no means of adjudicating among conflicting positive claim?rights. (shrink)

The name of A. M. Gorky is known to the broad masses of the people of our country, to the laboring population of the countries of the socialist camp, and to all advanced and progressive mankind as that of one of the greatest builders of the new socialist culture and a tireless fighter for the bright ideals of mankind. By his writings of genius, his brilliant articles of literary criticism, his speeches and public affairs writing, and all his many-faceted activity, (...) both prior to the Great October Socialist Revolution and in the epoch of transition from capitalism to socialism, Gorky made a truly invaluable contribution to the treasury of world culture. He defined the place and role of culture in the life of modern society and broke new ground for the progressive development of culture in terms of the principles of socialism and communism. There is hardly a single problem of socialist culture, of its theory and practice, with which Gorky did not concern himself one way or another, and upon the handling of which, even if his contact with it was accidental, he did not lay the unique imprint of his genius. (shrink)