David Bohm, Emeritus Professor of Theoretical Physics at Birkbeck College of the University of London and Fellow of the Royal Society, died of a heart attack on October 29, 1992 at the age of 74. Professor Bohm had been one of the world’s leading authorities on quantum theory and its interpretation for more than four decades. His contributions have been critical to all aspects of the field. He also made seminal contributions to plasma physics. His name appears prominently in the (...) modern physics literature, through the Aharonov- Bohm effect , the Bohm-EPR experiment , the Bohm-Pines collective description of particle interactions (random phase approximation), Bohm diffusion and the Bohm causal interpretation of quantum mechanics, also sometimes called the de Broglie-Bohm pilot wave theory. David Bohm was born in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania on December 20, 1917. A student of J. Robert Oppenheimer, Bohm received his Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley in 1943. In 1950 he completed the first of his six books, Quantum Theory, which became the definitive exposition of the orthodox (Copenhagen) interpretation of quantum mechanics. Here Bohm presented his reformulation of the paradox of Einstein, Podolsky, and Rosen. It is this Bohm version of EPR which has provided the basis for the enormous expansion of research on the foundations of quantum theory, focusing on nonlocality and the possible incompleteness of the quantum description (the question of “hidden variables”), which has occurred during the past several decades. (shrink)

The emerging concept of food sovereignty refers to the right of communities, peoples, and states to independently determine their own food and agricultural policies. It raises the question of which type of food production, agriculture and rural development should be pursued to guarantee food security for the world population. Social movements and non-governmental organizations have readily integrated the concept into their terminology. The concept is also beginning to find its way into the debates and policies of UN organizations and national (...) governments in both developing and industrialized countries. Beyond its relation to civil society movements little academic attention has been paid to the concept of food sovereignty and its appropriateness for international development policies aimed at reducing hunger and poverty, especially in comparison to the human right to adequate food (RtAF). We analyze, on the basis of an extensive literature review, the concept of food sovereignty with regard to its ability to contribute to hunger and poverty reduction worldwide as well as the challenges attached to this concept. Then, we compare the concept of food sovereignty with the RtAF and discuss the appropriateness of both concepts for national public sector policy makers and international development policies. We conclude that the impact on global food security is likely to be much greater if the RtAF approach predominated public policies. While the concept of food sovereignty may be appropriate for civil society movements, we recommend that the RtAF should obtain highest priority in national and international agricultural, trade and development policies. (shrink)

L’article présente un projet d’édition des OEuvres complètes du philosophe et satiriste allemand Salomo Friedlaender Mynona , entrepris en 2005. Partant de Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Goethe, Kant et Ernst Marcuse, le philosophe a développé les raisons fondamentales de « l’indifférence créatrice » et d’une polarité spécifique non romantique vers une étude philosophique approfondie. Installé à Berlin à partir de 1902, Friedlaender se trouvait au coeur des courants philosophiques et littéraires du XXe siècle – l’expressionnisme et le dadaïsme. Pacifiste déterminé et kantien (...) à l’heure de la Première guerre mondiale et de la République de Weimar, il a formulé dans ses satires populaires, les grotesques, une critique sévère de la culture en attirant l’attention, avec insistance, sur l’utopie pratique de la paix éternelle. En raison des circonstances difficiles – émigration à Paris en 1933 – et d’un malheureux hasard, il est tombé dans l’oubli. Grâce à cette nouvelle édition, dans le cadre de laquelle devraient paraître trente volumes dans les années à venir, il sera présenté au public à sa juste valeur. (shrink)

Marcus trouva dans le livre de Dingier, L’Effondrement de la science [Dingier 1926], des arguments importants en faveur de sa propre lut­te contre la crise scientifique et culturelle de l’époque, contre l’induction et le relativisme. Une correspondance s’engagea alors entre Dingier et Marcus. Elle fut poursuivie, après la mort de ce dernier en 1928, par son ami Friedlaender/Mynona. Marcus était conscient que Dingier refusait l’apriorisme kantien, il le voyait malgré tout comme un allié. Friedlander/Mynona critiqua sévèrement l’ambivalence de Dingier, en (...) particulier ses tendances irrationalis­tes. La constellation de ces trois auteurs a été jusqu’ici ignorée par les cher­cheurs, à l’exception de H. Lütdtke [Lüdtke 1989] qui a édité la correspondance Marcus-Dingler. Cet article, qui rassemble tous les documents connus ainsi que des inédits, permet d’exemplifier le débat intemporel entre un volontarisme empiriste et opportuniste d’une part, l’idéalisme kantien d’autre part. (shrink)

Marcus trouva dans le livre de Dingier, L’Effondrement de la science [Dingier 1926], des arguments importants en faveur de sa propre lut­te contre la crise scientifique et culturelle de l’époque, contre l’induction et le relativisme. Une correspondance s’engagea alors entre Dingier et Marcus. Elle fut poursuivie, après la mort de ce dernier en 1928, par son ami Friedlaender/Mynona. Marcus était conscient que Dingier refusait l’apriorisme kantien, il le voyait malgré tout comme un allié. Friedlander/Mynona critiqua sévèrement l’ambivalence de Dingier, en (...) particulier ses tendances irrationalis­tes. La constellation de ces trois auteurs a été jusqu’ici ignorée par les cher­cheurs, à l’exception de H. Lütdtke [Lüdtke 1989] qui a édité la correspondance Marcus-Dingler. Cet article, qui rassemble tous les documents connus ainsi que des inédits, permet d’exemplifier le débat intemporel entre un volontarisme empiriste et opportuniste d’une part, l’idéalisme kantien d’autre part. (shrink)

A specific form of research question, for instance, “What is the probability of a certain class of weather events, given global climate change, relative to a world without?” could be answered with the use of FAR or RR as the most common approaches to discover and ascribe extreme weather events. Kevin Trenberth et al. and Theodore Shepherd have expressed doubts in their latest works whether it is the most appropriate explanatory tool or the way of public outreach concerning climate events (...) and extremes. As an alternative, these researchers focus on complementary questions, for example, “How much did climate change affect the severity of a given storm?” advocating a “storyline” approach. New methods and new research questions are neither foreign, nor controversial from the standpoint of history and philosophy of science, especially those, related to public interest. Nevertheless, the new proposal has got a tepid reception from the majority of professionals of the given field. They argued that this approach can cause weakening of standards and neglecting of scientific method. The following paper attempts to find the roots of the supposed controversy. We claim inefficiency of uncompromising approach to D&A in absolute sense and assert that errors of a particular type may have a different level of concern in society, depending on the variety of contexts. Therefore, context defines the risk of over-estimation vs. under-estimation of harm. (shrink)

In Plautus and elsewhere in old Latin there is an imperative suffix -mino of medio-deponential meaning: opperimino, PL True. 188, progredimino, id. Pseud. 859, arbitramino, id. Epid. 695, praefamino, Cato, RR. 141, 2, famino Paul. Fest. 62, 10, Th., all 2 sg.; in legal documents, antestamino, in the XII Tables, fruimino, CIL. 1, 199, profitemino in Lex Iulia Municipalis, all 3 sg. The generally accepted explanation of the form is that it arose from a contamination of the ordinary 2 pl. (...) medio-passive imperative in -mini and the 2, 3 sg. forms in -to, Lindsay, Latin Language, p. 517, Von Planta, Gramm. d. oskisch-umbr. Dial. II, pp. 310 sqq., Buck, Elementarb. d. oskisch-umbr. Dial. p. 112, Sommer, Hdb. d. lat. Laut- u. Formenlehre, p. 366, Stolz, Lat. Gramm*. p. 158. The Oskan and the Umbrian forms in -mo, -mu, U. spahamu, eturstahmu, persnimu, O. censamur, all of 2 or 3 sg., and U. arsmahamo, caterahamo of 2 or 3 pi., are identified with the Lat. -minō forms on the assumption that the Osk-Umbr. -mu represents an older *-mnō which in turn arose by syncope from -*menō Von Planta, l.c. This explanation is the most satisfactory that has been given, and we may suppose that Latin, Oskan, and Umbrian had an imperative form in *-menō. (shrink)

In Plautus and elsewhere in old Latin there is an imperative suffix -mino of medio-deponential meaning: opperimino, PL True. 188 , progredimino, id. Pseud. 859, arbitramino, id. Epid. 695, praefamino, Cato, RR. 141, 2, famino Paul. Fest. 62, 10, Th., all 2 sg.; in legal documents, antestamino , in the XII Tables, fruimino , CIL. 1, 199, profitemino in Lex Iulia Municipalis, all 3 sg. The generally accepted explanation of the form is that it arose from a contamination of the (...) ordinary 2 pl. medio-passive imperative in -mini and the 2, 3 sg. forms in -to, Lindsay, Latin Language, p. 517, Von Planta, Gramm. d. oskisch-umbr. Dial. II, pp. 310 sqq., Buck, Elementarb. d. oskisch-umbr. Dial. p. 112, Sommer, Hdb. d. lat. Laut- u. Formenlehre, p. 366, Stolz, Lat. Gramm*. p. 158. The Oskan and the Umbrian forms in -mo, -mu, U. spahamu, eturstahmu, persnimu, O. censamur, all of 2 or 3 sg., and U. arsmahamo, caterahamo of 2 or 3 pi., are identified with the Lat. -minō forms on the assumption that the Osk-Umbr. -mu represents an older *-mnō which in turn arose by syncope from -*menō Von Planta, l.c. This explanation is the most satisfactory that has been given, and we may suppose that Latin, Oskan, and Umbrian had an imperative form in *-menō. (shrink)

Although to what extent Oswald Spengler served as a forerunner or precursor of National Socialism remains controversial, scholars unanimously agree that he was a virulent antidemocratic thinker. Indeed, the mere mentioning of his name immediately conjures up among students of German political philosophy associations of intense antidemocratic sentiment. The epithet of virulent opponent of democracy is certainly well-deserved for the period in his political-philosophical development when he was famous, spanning 1919, the year the heated controversy surrounding his major work The (...) Decline of the West erupted, to his untimely death in 1936. Yet what about the little-known, but important phase in the evolution of Spengler's political thought, the years immediately before the shocking military collapse of Imperial Germany and the outbreak of socialist revolution in the fall of 1918 aroused the hostility of the entire right against Germany's first democracy? These were years when Spengler, as an unknown private scholar industriously composing his chef-d'oeuvre, was politically inactive. Was Spengler passionately anti-democratic before he became an embittered man? The following investigation of this rather obscure but important period in his thought, which draws heavily upon his private papers in the Spengler Archives, surprisingly reveals that he was not vehemently antidemocratic during this time and was, in fact, a cynical and opportunistic conservative advocate of the idea of the quasi-democratization of the Second Reich. Spengler scholars, it should be noted, including among others Anton Mirko Koktanek, Gilbert Merlio, H. Stuart Hughes, Klemens von Klemperer, Horst Moller, Walter Struve and Detlef Felken, do not argue this novel position as they are not of the opinion that any significant changes in his attitude towards democratization in Germany took place in his intellectual career. (shrink)

This collection of essays, published to coincide with Tony Honore's sixty-fifth birthday, focuses on the areas where Honore's thought has made the most significant contribution: Roman law and jurisprudence. Included are essays by P.S. Atiyah, Zenon Bankowski, John Bell, Peter Birks, John W. Cairs, Hugh Collins, David Daube, W. M. Gordon, J. W. Harris Nicola Lacey, A. D. E. Lewis, Detlef Liebs, G. D. MacCormack, Neil MacCormick, G. Maher, Pieter Norr, Alan Rodger, and Peter Stein.

Quantum philosophy, a peculiar twentieth-century malady, is responsible for most of the conceptual muddle plaguing the foundations of quantum physics. When this philosophy is eschewed, one naturally arrives at Bohmian mechanics, which is what emerges from Schrodinger's equation for a nonrelativistic system of particles when we merely insist that 'particles' means particles. While distinctly non-Newtonian, Bohmian mechanics is a fully deterministic theory of particles in motion, a motion choreographed by the wave function. The quantum formalism emerges when measurement situations are (...) analyzed according to this theory. When the quantum formalism is regarded as arising in this way, the paradoxes and perplexities so often associated with quantum theory simply evaporate.Bohr's ... approach to atomic problems ... is really remarkable. He is completely convinced that any understanding in the usual sense of the word is impossible. Therefore the conversation is almost immediately driven into philosophical questions, and soon you no longer know whether you really take the position he is attacking, or whether you really must attack the position he is defending. (shrink)

It is natural for those with permissive attitudes toward abortion to suppose that, if they have examined all of the arguments they know against abortion and have concluded that they fail, their moral deliberations are at an end. Surprisingly, this is not the case, as I argue. This is because the mere risk that one of those arguments succeeds can generate a moral reason that counts against the act. If this is so, then liberals may be mistaken about the morality (...) of abortion. However, conservatives who claim that considerations of risk rule out abortion in general are mistaken as well. Instead, risk-based considerations generate an important but not necessarily decisive reason to avoid abortion. The more general issue that emerges is how to accommodate fallibilism about practical judgment in our decision-making. (shrink)

In this article, we develop an approach for the moral assessment of research and development networks on the basis of the reflective equilibrium approach proposed by Rawls and Daniels. The reflective equilibrium approach aims at coherence between moral judgments, principles, and background theories. We use this approach because it takes seriously the moral judgments of the actors involved in R & D, whereas it also leaves room for critical reflection about these judgments. It is shown that two norms, namely reflective (...) learning and openness and inclusiveness, which are used in the literature on policy and technological networks, contribute to achieving a justified overlapping consensus. We apply the approach to a case study about the development of an innovative sewage treatment technology and show how in this case the two norms are or could be instrumental in achieving a justified overlapping consensus on relevant moral issues. (shrink)

It is well known that density matrices can be used in quantum mechanics to represent the information available to an observer about either a system with a random wave function or a system that is entangled with another system. We point out another role, previously unnoticed in the literature, that a density matrix can play: it can be the “conditional density matrix,” conditional on the configuration of the environment. A precise definition can be given in the context of Bohmian mechanics, (...) whereas orthodox quantum mechanics is too vague to allow a sharp definition, except perhaps in special cases. In contrast to statistical and reduced density matrices, forming the conditional density matrix involves no averaging. In Bohmian mechanics with spin, the conditional density matrix replaces the notion of conditional wave function, as the object with the same dynamical significance as the wave function of a Bohmian system. (shrink)

An appropriate kind of curved Hilbert space is developed in such a manner that it admits operators of $\mathcal{C}$ - and $\mathfrak{D}$ -differentiation, which are the analogues of the familiar covariant and D-differentiation available in a manifold. These tools are then employed to shed light on the space-time structure of Quantum Mechanics, from the points of view of the Feynman ‘path integral’ and of canonical quantisation. (The latter contains, as a special case, quantisation in arbitrary curvilinear coordinates when space is (...) flat.) The influence of curvature is emphasised throughout, with an illustration provided by the Aharonov-Bohm effect. (shrink)

How does the study of society relate to the study of the people it comprises? This longstanding question is partly one of method, but mainly one of fact, of how independent the objects of these two studies, societies and people, are. It is commonly put as a question of reduction, and I shall tackle it in that form: does sociology reduce in principle to individual psychology? I follow custom in calling the claim that it does ‘individualism’ and its denial ‘holism’.

There have in recent years been at least two important attempts to get to grips with Aristotle's conception of dialectic. I have in mind those by Martha C. Nussbaum in ‘Saving Aristotle's appearances’, which is chapter 8 of her The Fragility of Goodness , and by Terence H. Irwin in his important, though in my opinion somewhat misguided, book Aristotle's First Principles . There is a sense in which both of these writers are reacting to the work of G. E. (...) L. Owen on cognate matters, particularly his well-known paper ‘ Tithenai ta phainomena ’. Owen himself was in part reacting to what I suppose is the traditional view of how Aristotle regarded dialectic, as revealed in Topics I. 1. On that view dialectic is for Aristotle a lesser way of proceeding than is demonstration, the method of science. For demonstration proceeds from premises which are accepted as true in themselves and moves from them to conclusions which follow necessarily from those premises; and the middle term of such a demonstrative syllogism then provides the ‘reason why’ for the truth of the conclusion. Dialectic proceeds from premises which are accepted on a lesser basis ‘by everyone or by the majority or by the wise, i.e. by all, or by the majority, or by the most notable and reputable of them’ , and proceeds deductively from them to further conclusions. (shrink)

An infinite lottery machine is used as a foil for testing the reach of inductive inference, since inferences concerning it require novel extensions of probability. Its use is defensible if there is some sense in which the lottery is physically possible, even if exotic physics is needed. I argue that exotic physics is needed and describe several proposals that fail and at least one that succeeds well enough.

Entities of many kinds, not just material things, have been credited with parts. Armstrong, for example, has taken propositions and properties to be parts of their conjunctions, sets to be parts of sets that include them, and geographical regions and events to be parts of regions and events that contain them. The justification for bringing all these diverse relations under a single ‘part–whole’ concept is that they share all or most of the formal features articulated in mereology. But the concept (...) has also prompted an ontological thesis that has been expressed in various ways: that wholes are ‘no ontological addition’ to their parts ; that to list both a whole and its parts is ‘double counting’; and that there is ‘no more’ to a whole than its parts: for example, that there is no more to a conjunction than the conjuncts that are its parts, and whose truth or falsity determines whether it is true or false. For brevity, I shall express the thesis in the last of these ways, as the claim that entities with parts are ‘nothing but’ those parts. (shrink)

Science naively presupposes the intelligibility of the universe, necessary laws, and a universal truth. The author reflects on these presuppositions to arrive at a demonstration of God's existence. In a vigorous and exclamatory style, he condemns the alternative views of idealism, phenomenology, and philosophies of science which cannot rationally justify their faith in a universal truth. The only rational basis for these presuppositions is a theistic God--the "Vérité mesurante" and "Pensée fondatrice" of scientific reason.--A. B. D.

We investigate a possible form of Schrödinger’s equation as it appears to moving observers. It is shown that, in this framework, accelerated motion requires fictitious potentials to be added to the original equation. The gauge invariance of the formulation is established. The example of accelerated Euclidean transformations is treated explicitly, which contain Galilean transformations as special cases. The relationship between an acceleration and a gravitational field is found to be compatible with the picture of the ‘Einstein elevator’. The physical effects (...) of an acceleration are illustrated by the problem of the uniformly-accelerated harmonic oscillator. (shrink)

Detlef Breitenband gibt in seinem Buch einen problemorientierten Überblick über die Rechtstheorien von Immanuel Kant und Jürgen Habermas. Im Zentrum steht die Frage nach der Leistungsfähigkeit beider Rechtstheorien, da diese den Konsens aller Rechtsadressaten zur Grundlage haben, aber nicht davon ausgegangen wird, dass jemals über eine Rechtsnorm ein faktischer Konsens erzeugt wird. Der Autor arbeitet die radikal-demokratischen Implikationen des Kantischen Republikanismus heraus und leistet einen wichtigen Beitrag zur Klärung des Begriffs der Legitimation von Rechtsnormen.

This paper presents a new formal model for D–N explanation that gives intuitive criteria of acceptability, avoids the known trivializations, and links explanation with confirmation theory. Although set in the twenty-five year tradition of attempts to formalize D–N explanation, it proposes a new direction for the model that is to be distinguished from the syntactical and informational approaches by its introduction of restrictions which derive from the use which the D–N model can have in hypothesis testing. This model, illustrating the (...) verificational approach, revises the classic H–O requirements and amends the notion of partial self-explanation to meet a criticism to which the H–O notion is vulnerable. (shrink)