A review‐article of Julius Stone, Legal System and Lawyers' Reasonings, Stanford, University Press Herbert Wechsler, Principles, Politics and Fundamental Law, Harvard University Press H. L. A. Hart, The Concept of Law, Oxford University Press Richard A. Wasserstrom, The Judicial Decision, Toward a Theory of Legal Justification, Stanford University Press Judith N. Shklar, Legalism, Harvard University Press.

Philosophies of essence provides a critical evaluation of the concept of 'essence' from the Pre-Socratics to the present, as well as indicating the social roots of the various developments. Further, it shows the fruitfulness the concept still has for a scientific materialistic outlook. In addition, a new dual formulation of the concept is given.--Preface.

We present a conceptual framework on the experience of time and provide a coherent basis on which to base further inquiries into qualitative approaches concerning time experience. We propose two Time-Layers and two Time-Formats forming four Time-Domains. Micro-Flow and Micro-Structure represent the implicit phenomenal basis, from which the explicit experiences of Macro-Flow and Macro-Structure emerge. Complementary to this theoretical proposal, we present empirical results from qualitative content analysis obtained from 25 healthy participants. The data essentially corroborate the theoretical proposal. With (...) respect to Flow, the phenomenally accessible time experience appeared as a continuous passage reaching from the past through the present into the future. With respect to Structure, the individual present was embedded in the individual biography, emerging from past experiences and comprising individual plans and goals. New or changing plans and goals were being integrated into the existing present, thus forming a new present. The future appeared as changeable within the present, by means from the past, and therefore as a space of potential opportunities. Exemplarily, we discuss these results in relation to previous empirical findings on deviant experiences of time in Autism Spectrum Disorder that is presumably characterized by a breakdown of Flow and concomitant compensatory repetition resulting in an overly structured time. Finally, we speculate about possible implications of these findings both for psychopathological and neuroscientific research. (shrink)

As theorists, developers, and practitioners of the anticipatory governance of emerging technologies, we applaud Ankeny et al.’s...

Religious traditions can be drawn on in a number of ways to illuminate discussions of the moral standing of animals and the ethical use of animals in scientific research. I begin with some general comments about relevant points in the history of major religions. I then briefly describe American civil religion, including the cult of health, and its relation to scientific research. Finally, I offer a critique of American civil religion from a Christian perspective.

Book reviewed in this article: Suffering and the Beneficent Community: Beyond Libertarianism. By Erich H. Loewy. The Nature of Suffering and the Goals of Medicine. By Eric J. Cassell.

The paper is a set of reflections on the moral culture of modern biology built around the author’s experience as a participant observer in two university laboratories. I draw parallels between laboratory culture and organized religion and point out practical problems in conducting scientific research. The notion that good biologists must be atheists is questioned and failures of organized religion are noted. The paper concludes with a suggestion that research ethics should be rooted in laboratory practice and must include vigorous (...) principles of honesty and justice. Those are not requirements imposed from outside but internal requirements of the research community. (shrink)

Book reviewed in this article: Suffering and the Beneficent Community: Beyond Libertarianism. By Erich H. Loewy. The Nature of Suffering and the Goals of Medicine. By Eric J. Cassell.

This is the first of two papers that use off-training set (OTS) error to investigate the assumption-free relationship between learning algorithms. This first paper discusses the senses in which there are no a priori distinctions between learning algorithms. (The second paper discusses the senses in which there are such distinctions.) In this first paper it is shown, loosely speaking, that for any two algorithms A and B, there are “as many” targets (or priors over targets) for which A has lower (...) expected OTS error than B as vice versa, for loss functions like zero-one loss. In particular, this is true if A is cross-validation and B is “anti-cross-validation” (choose the learning algorithm with largest cross-validation error). This paper ends with a discussion of the implications of these results for computational learning theory. It is shown that one cannot say: if empirical misclassification rate is low, the Vapnik-Chervonenkis dimension of your generalizer is small, and the training set is large, then with high probability your OTS error is small. Other implications for “membership queries” algorithms and “punting” algorithms are also discussed. (shrink)

I have been a Daniel Callahan reader for over thirty years. My first published review was of Abortion: Law, Choice, and Morality. Callahan's latest book, The Five Horsemen of the Modern World: Climate, Food, Water, Disease, and Obesity, is a sustained and detailed explanation of a series of challenges facing humankind in this century. Callahan's prognosis is bleak, his analyses credible, and while hope is not lost, the moral of the story is that we had better get our act together (...) fast. Callahan argues that when we face challenges like these, rational persuasion is insufficient. Human emotions must be engaged. Without knowledgeable emotional engagement by millions of people, we are done for. It seems to me that he is really calling for a national cultural conversion experience, rather as, almost three hundred years ago, Jonathan Edwards declared that if there is a hell, it makes good sense to frighten people out of it! (shrink)

This article provides a friendly criticism of Meilaender’s positions on the beginning of life and decision making at the end of life. It is argued that his version of the self is narrowly physicalist and individualist with no room for the essentially social and psychological parts of identity or selfhood. That in turn leads to his rigoristic or tutioristic judgments on end of life care.

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The epistemic arrow of time is the fact that our knowledge of the past seems to be both of a different kind and more detailed than our knowledge of the future. Just like with the other arrows of time, it has often been speculated that the epistemic arrow arises due to the second law of thermodynamics. In this paper, we investigate the epistemic arrow of time using a fully formal framework. We begin by defining a memory system as any physical (...) system whose present state can provide information about the state of the external world at some time other than the present. We then identify two types of memory systems in our universe, along with an important special case of the first type, which we distinguish as a third type of memory system. We show that two of these types of memory systems are time-symmetric, able to provide knowledge about both the past and the future. However, the third type of memory systems exploits the second law of thermodynamics, at least in all of its instances in our universe that we are aware of. The result is that in our universe, this type of memory system only ever provides information about the past. We also argue that human memory is of this third type, completing the argument. We end by scrutinizing the basis of the second law itself. This uncovers a previously unappreciated formal problem for common arguments that try to derive the second law from the “Past Hypothesis”, i.e., from the claim that the very early universe was in a state of extremely low entropy. Our analysis is indebted to prior work by one of us but expands and improves upon this work in several respects. (shrink)

At least since Descartes, philosophers have been interested in the special knowledge or authority that we exhibit when we speak about our own thoughts, attitudes, and feelings. This book contends that even the best work in contemporary philosophy of mind fails to account for this sort of knowledge or authority because it does not pay the right sort of attention to the notion of expression. What's at stake is not only how to understand self-knowledge and first-person authority, but also what (...) it is that distinguishes conscious from unconscious psychological states, what the mental life of a nonlinguistic animal has in common with our sort of mental life, and how to think about Wittgenstein's legacy to the philosophy of mind. (shrink)

We introduce a framework that can be used to model both mathematics and human reasoning about mathematics. This framework involves stochastic mathematical systems (SMSs), which are stochastic processes that generate pairs of questions and associated answers (with no explicit referents). We use the SMS framework to define normative conditions for mathematical reasoning, by defining a “calibration” relation between a pair of SMSs. The first SMS is the human reasoner, and the second is an “oracle” SMS that can be interpreted as (...) deciding whether the question–answer pairs of the reasoner SMS are valid. To ground thinking, we understand the answers to questions given by this oracle to be the answers that would be given by an SMS representing the entire mathematical community in the infinite long run of the process of asking and answering questions. We then introduce a slight extension of SMSs to allow us to model both the physical universe and human reasoning about the physical universe. We then define a slightly different calibration relation appropriate for the case of scientific reasoning. In this case the first SMS represents a human scientist predicting the outcome of future experiments, while the second SMS represents the physical universe in which the scientist is embedded, with the question–answer pairs of that SMS being specifications of the experiments that will occur and the outcome of those experiments, respectively. Next we derive conditions justifying two important patterns of inference in both mathematical and scientific reasoning: (i) the practice of increasing one’s degree of belief in a claim as one observes increasingly many lines of evidence for that claim, and (ii) abduction, the practice of inferring a claim’s probability of being correct from its explanatory power with respect to some other claim that is already taken to hold for independent reasons. (shrink)

The famous French chemist, Marcelin Berthelot, published his first scientific paper in 1850. However, reference to this paper has been largely ignored in the various accounts of his lasting contributions to chemistry. The probable reason for this is that this paper is concerned with a method of subjecting a liquid to tension, and it is more appropriate to regard it as a paper on physics rather than on chemistry. In the work described in this largely-forgotten paper, written whilst he was (...) still a young research student, Berthelot showed that liquids contained in his ‘Berthelot tube’ could withstand a considerable tension; and he is the first person to have observed cavitation, a phenomenon which has been studied so widely this century. The next mention in the literature of the Berthelot tube method is at the turn of the present century, after which it again seems to have been forgotten until the 1940s; since then there has been considerable progress using the Berthelot tube technique. In this paper the work described in Berthelot's original paper is discussed in some detail, and the subsequent fruitful development of the method is also traced and assessed. (shrink)

This study takes a Christian perspective on the entire Bible, rather than simply the New Testament. David Wenkel asks: Why did Jesus have to be beaten before his death on the cross? Christian theology has largely focused on Jesus' death but has given relatively little attention to his sufferings. Wenkel's answer contextualizes Jesus' crucifixion sufferings as informed by the language of Proverbs. He explains that Jesus' sufferings demonstrate the wisdom of God's plan to provide a substitute for foolish sinners. (...) Jesus was beaten as a fool - even though he was no fool, in order to fulfill God's loving plan of salvation. This analysis is then placed within the larger storyline of the whole bible - from the Garden of Eden to the story of Israel and beyond. (shrink)

The important recent book by Schurz ( 2019 ) appreciates that the no-free-lunch theorems (NFL) have major implications for the problem of (meta) induction. Here I review the NFL theorems, emphasizing that they do not only concern the case where there is a uniform prior—they prove that there are “as many priors” (loosely speaking) for which any induction algorithm _A_ out-generalizes some induction algorithm _B_ as vice-versa. Importantly though, in addition to the NFL theorems, there are many _free lunch_ theorems. (...) In particular, the NFL theorems can only be used to compare the expected performance of an induction algorithm _A_, considered in isolation, with the expected performance of an induction algorithm _B_, considered in isolation. There is a rich set of free lunches which instead concern the statistical _correlations_ among the generalization errors of induction algorithms. As I describe, the meta-induction algorithms that Schurz advocates as a “solution to Hume’s problem” are simply examples of such a free lunch based on correlations among the generalization errors of induction algorithms. I end by pointing out that the prior that Schurz advocates, which is uniform over bit frequencies rather than bit patterns, is contradicted by thousands of experiments in statistical physics and by the great success of the maximum entropy procedure in inductive inference. (shrink)