This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be (...) preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. To ensure a quality reading experience, this work has been proofread and republished using a format that seamlessly blends the original graphical elements with text in an easy-to-read typeface. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

A differential manifold (d-manifold, for short) can be defined as a pair (M, C), where M is any set and C is a family of real functions on M which is (i) closed with respect to localization and (ii) closed with respect to superposition with smooth Euclidean functions; one also assumes that (iii) M is locally diffeomorphic to Rn. These axioms have a straightforward physical interpretation. Axioms (i) and (ii) formalize certain “compatibility conditions” which usually are supposed to be assumed (...) tacitly by physicists. Axiom (iii) may be though of as a (nonmetric) version of Einstein's equivalence principle. By dropping axiom (iii), one obtains a more general structure called a differential space (d-space). Every subset of Rn turns out to be a d-space. Nevertheless it is mathematically a workable structure. It might be expected that somewhere in the neighborhood of the Big Bang there is a domain in which space-time is not a d-manifold but still continues to be a d-space. In such a domain we would have a physics without the (usual form of the) equivalence principle. Simple examples of d-spaces which are not d-manifolds elucidate the principal characteristics the resulting physics would manifest. (shrink)

Feminist Time Against Nation Time offers a series of essays that explore the complex and oftentimes contradictory relationship between feminism and nationalism through a problematization of contemporality. The collection pursues the following questions: how do the specific temporalities of nationalism and war limit and delimit public spaces in which dissent might happen; and how might we account for the often contradictory and ambiguous relationship of "feminism" and "nationalism" through an exploration of the problem of time?

In 1962 Hilary Putnam forced us to face the possibility of robot cats. More than twenty years later Daniel Dennett found himself doing battle with mad scientists and other “bogeymen.” Though these two examples are employed in different philosophical arena, there is an important connection between them that has not been emphasized. Separating the concept associated with a kind term from the extension of that term, as Putnam and others have urged, raises the possibility of accepting counterexamples to compatibilistic analyses (...) without rejecting compatibilism. Even if no compatibilist analysis of our concept of free action is acceptable, a compatibilist account of the essential nature of free action may be. (shrink)

Stephen Miller attempts to confute the idea that capitalist accumulation characterised the agriculture of the Île-de-France prior to the Revolution. Instead he tries to assimilate the agriculture of the north into theAnnalesmodel of neo-Malthusian agricultural cycles and Chayanovian subsistence economy which is supposedly characteristic of the Midi. I argue instead that the notion of a northern capitalist agriculture is rooted not only in the extensive modern research of Moriceau but in the political-economic writings of Turgot and Marx which have been (...) largely ignored. Accumulation in the sense of the growth of fixed and variable capital and emerging technological progress characterised northern agriculture. The persistence of small producers which Miller sees as an index of unchanging stasis might better be investigated in terms of the evolution over time of a reservoir of wage labour for larger-scale enterprises as pointed out by Kautsky. (shrink)

Referring to the video testimony of Holocaust survivor Mrs. K. and interviewer and psychoanalyst Kurt Grünberg, I propose to analyse the body movement behavior in interaction in this interview as the “Gestalt” of memory units. According to the theory of embodiment and following Daniel Stern, I show how it is possible to co-construct sense while watching nonverbal aspects of giving testimony. Using different methods of movement analysis such as KMP, LMA, NEUROGES and MEA, this study was conducted by means of (...) phenomenological inquiry. I suggest that a hermeneutic perspective on movement aspects can thus be used to enrich the transcript and provide a broader and highly specific understanding of this testimony. Movement can thus be seen as an integral part of transmission. (shrink)

The Stoic theory of recurrence is founded on Stoic biological and cosmological doctrines. This paper argues that these connections are far more elaborate and well-determined than generally assumed. Evidence from the Stoic theory of the motion of pneuma is brought to bear and a rival geometric model of time is supported against the standard linear and circular models supported by Salles and Long. The new ‘torus model’ is inspired by Alexander of Aphrodisias’ inquisitive questioning of what form the peculiar motion (...) of pneuma may possibly have and based on the evidence in which the Stoics discuss the simultaneous inward/outward motion of pneuma. A new perspective is offered as to what form this motion may take, which ultimately offers an insight into the mechanics of recurrence as also some of the long-standing paradoxes of recurrence. (shrink)

Readings of the Platform Sūtra. Edited by Morten Schlütter and Stephen F. Teiser. New York: Columbia University Press, 2012. Pp. ix + 220. $27. The Platform Sūtra of the Sixth Patriarch: The Text of the Tun-Huang Manuscript. Translated by Philip B. Yampolsky with a new foreword by Morten Schlütter. New York: Columbia University Press, 2012. Pp. xvi + 220 + 30. $32.

The phenomenon of philosophizing scientists is well known in the twentieth century literature; one need mention only Arthur Eddington, James Jeans or Edmund Whittaker. Even the wide spread of neopositivistic ideology was not able to stop the best among scientists from publicly expressing their philosophical views. The writings of Einstein, Schrodinger, Heisenberg and of many other outstanding physicists have significantly shaped our way of understanding the Universe and our place in it. The fall of neopositivism and recent advances in theoretical (...) physics, which seem to touch extremities of the empirical method and to demand some sort of philosophical justification, have strengthened this tendency. The gap between philosophy and science may not exist any longer, but the gap between philosophers and scientists continues to exercise its deplorable influence on science and philosophy. The book by Barrow and Tipler testifies to both of these things: it shows how the far-reaching horizons of modern physics and cosmology could be open for philosophical thinking, and simultaneously it demonstrates how this thinking, when done by physicists, is far away from that to which professional philosophers are accustomed. I. (shrink)

English summary: The modern age understands justice not only as being an object of jurisprudence. Historical, philosophical, social and cultural studies along with theological approaches each draw near to justice in their own way. This collection devotes itself to the intricate interaction of outside perspectives with the judicial-interdisciplinary thematisation of the law, presenting revised papers delivered at the Protestant Institute for Interdisciplinary Research's symposium in honour of Professor Dr. Dres. h.c. Eberhard Schmidt-Aamann. The case studies and basic considerations deal (...) with, among other things, the function of the law in antique city states, the immanence and transcendence of justice from a theological perspective, as well as the relationship between economics and legal study. German description: Das Recht ist in der Moderne langst nicht nur Gegenstand der Rechtswissenschaft. Historische, philosophische, sozial- und kulturwissenschaftliche wie auch theologische Ansatze nahern sich dem Recht in je eigener Weise. Solche Aussenperspektiven stehen in komplexer Wechselwirkung mit der juristisch-binnendisziplinaren Thematisierung des Rechts. Dieser Sammelband ist dem Wechselspiel von Aussen- und Binnenperspektiven gewidmet. Er vereint die uberarbeiteten Beitrage eines Symposions, das an der Forschungsstatte der Evangelischen Studiengemeinschaft in Heidelberg zu Ehren von Prof. Dr. Dres. h.c. Eberhard Schmidt-Assmann veranstaltet wurde. Die exemplarischen Fallstudien und Grundsatzuberlegungen thematisieren unter anderem die Funktion des Rechts in antiken Stadtstaaten, die Immanenz und Transzendenz des Rechts aus theologischer Perspektive sowie das Verhaltnis von Okonomik und Rechtswissenschaft. Mit Beitragen von: Hans Diefenbacher, Hans-Joachim Gehrke, Klaus Gunther, Christoph Mollers, Thorsten Moos, Michael Moxter, Bernhard Nagel, Martin Ramstedt, Karl-Siegbert Rehberg, Magnus Schlette, Eberhard Schmidt-Assmann. (shrink)

The issue of infinity appeared in cosmology in the form of a question on spatial and time finiteness or infinity of the universe. Recently, more and more talking is going on about “other universes” (different ones from “our”), the number of which may be infinite. Speculations on this topic emerged in effect of the discussions on the issue of the anthropic principle, and the so-called inflation scenario. In truth, this kind of speculations are hardly recognized as scientific theories, however, they (...) may be included in a sort of “scientific fringe” fulfilling a beneficial heuristic function.All of the speculations regarding numerous universes boil down to the juggling of probabilities, i.e. to the applying of the theory of probability to the universes’ set. However, without probabilistic measure being introduced onto this “set” (as it is not known whether it is a set in a technical sense of this term)—and there is no knowledge at all as to how to do this—such considerations may not go beyond a vague intuition.The producing of other universes usually results from an assumption that the disturbing of original circumstances, of values of physical constants, or of other parameters characterizing the universe is possible. On the other hand, the idea of the final theory seems to assume that the mathematical structure of this theory should be rigid, i.e. that the disturbing of its parameters leads on to the very same structure. This would have eliminated the possibility of the existence of other universes.The idea of infinite number of universes sometimes has an anti-theological undertone: there is no need for assuming purposeful acting of the Creator, since all possibilities are fulfilled. The reaction of a theologian may be as follows: Just the same, God may create just a single universe, as much as an infinite number of universes. What’s more, one may risk saying that God is not interested in nothing that may be short of infinity. (shrink)

The Inner Touch presents the archaeology of a single sense: the sense of being sentient. Aristotle was perhaps the first to define this faculty when in his treatise On the Soul he identified a sensory power, irreducible to the five senses, by which animals perceive that they are perceiving: the simple "sense," as he wrote, "that we are seeing and hearing." After him, thinkers returned, time and again, to define and redefine this curious sensation. The classical Greek and Roman philosophers (...) as well as the medieval Arabic, Hebrew, and Latin thinkers who followed them all investigated a power they called "the common sense," which one ancient author likened to "a kind of inner touch, by which we are able to grasp ourselves." Their many findings were not lost with the waning of the Middle Ages. From Montaigne and Francis Bacon to Locke, Leibniz, and Rousseau, from nineteenth-century psychiatry and neurology to Proust and Walter Benjamin, the writers and thinkers of the modern period have turned knowingly and unknowing to the terms of older traditions in exploring the perception that every sensitive being possesses of its life.The Inner Touch reconstructs and reconsiders the history of this perception. In twenty-five concise chapters that move freely among ancient, medieval, and modern cultures, Daniel Heller-Roazen investigates a set of exemplary phenomena that have played central roles in philosophical, literary, psychological, and medical accounts of the nature of animal existence. Here sensation and self-sensation, sleeping and waking, aesthetics and anesthetics, perception and apperception, animal nature and human nature, consciousness and unconsciousness, all acquire a new meaning.The Inner Touch proposes an original, elegant, and far-reaching philosophical inquiry into a problem that has never been more pressing: what it means to feel that one is alive.Winner of the Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Comparative Literary Studies. (shrink)

Darwin proposed that evolutionary novelties are environmentally induced in organisms “constitutionally” sensitive to environmental change, with selection effective owing to the inheritance of constitutional responses. A molecular theory of inheritance, pangenesis , explained the cross‐generational transmission of environmentally induced traits, as required for evolution by natural selection. The twentieth‐century evolutionary synthesis featured mutation as the source of novelty, neglecting the role of environmental induction. But current knowledge of environmentally sensitive gene expression, combined with the idea of genetic accommodation of mutationally (...) and environmentally induced change, supports a revival of Darwin's original theory that is consistent with modern molecular and population genetics. †To contact the author, please write to: Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, c/o Escuela de Biología, Universidad de Costa Rica, Costa Rica; e‐mail: [email protected]. (shrink)