In this book, best-selling author and mathematician Haim Shapira presents an introduction to mathematical theories which deal with the most beautiful concept ever invented by humankind: infinity. Written in clear, simple language and aimed at a lay audience, this book also offers some strategies that will allow readers to try their ability at solving truly fascinating mathematical problems. Infinity is a deeply counter-intuitive concept that has inspired many great thinkers. In this book we will meet many sages, both familiar (...) and unfamiliar: Zeno and Pythagoras, Georg Cantor and Bertrand Russell, Sofia Kovalevskaya and Emmy Noether, al-Khwarizmi and Euclid, Sophie Germain and Srinivasa Ramanujan. The world of infinity is inhabited by many paradoxes, and so is this book: Zeno paradoxes, Hilbert's "Infinity Hotel", Achilles and the gods paradox, the paradox of heaven and hell, the Ross-Littlewood paradox involving tennis balls, the Galileo paradox and many more. Aimed at the curious but non-technical reader, this book refrains from using any fearsome mathematical symbols. It uses only the most basic operations of mathematics: adding, subtracting, multiplication, division, powers and roots - that is all. But that doesn't mean that a bit of deep thinking won't be necessary and rewarding. Writing with humour and lightness of touch, Haim Shapira banishes the chalky pallor of the schoolroom and offers instead a truly thrilling intellectual journey. Fasten your seatbelt - we are going to Infinity, and beyond! (shrink)

Chinese Philosophy provides a clear, accessible conception of the Chinese philosophical sensibility and its evolution throughout history.

Naïve realism is the view that veridical experiences are fundamentally relations of acquaintance to external objects and their features, and multidisjunctivism is the conjunction of naïve realism and the view that hallucinatory experiences don’t share a common fundamental kind. Multidisjunctivism allegedly removes the screening-off worry over naïve realism, and the relevant literature suggests that multidisjunctivism is one of the naïve realist responses to the worry. The present paper argues that the multidisjunctive solution is implicitly changing the subject, so the impression (...) that the multidisjunctivist is addressing the screening-off problem is illusory. (shrink)

This paper presents a novel semantic analysis of unit names (like pound and meter) and gradable adjectives (like tall, short and happy), inspired by measurement theory (Krantz et al. In Foundations of measurement: Additive and Polynomial Representations, 1971). Based on measurement theory’s four-way typology of measures, I claim that different adjectives are associated with different types of measures whose special characteristics, together with features of the relations denoted by unit names, explain the puzzling limited distribution of measure phrases, as well (...) as unit-based comparisons between predicates (as in the table is longer than it is wide). All considered, my analyses support the view that the grammar of natural languages is sensitive to features of measurement theory. (shrink)

The Enigma of Desire: Sex, Longing and Belonging in Psychoanalysis, introduces new perspectives on desire and longing, in and outside of the analytic relationship._ _This exciting volume explores the known and unknown, ghosts and demons, sexuality and lust. Galit Atlas discusses the subjects of sex and desire and explores what she terms the Enigmatic and the Pragmatic aspects of sexuality, longing, female desire, sexual inhibition, pregnancy, parenthood and creativity. The author focuses on the levels of communication that take place (...) in the most intimate settings: between mothers and their babies; between lovers; in the unconscious bond of two people— in the consulting room, where two individuals sit alone in one room, looking and listening, breathing and dreaming. Atlas examines the ways in which different languages, translations and integrations focus on birth, death, sexuality, and human bonds. In _The Enigma of Desire_ each chapter opens with a narrative, a therapeutic story which illustrates both the analyst’s and patient’s desires and the ways these interact and emerge in the consulting room. This book will be of interest to anyone who is interested in the intricacies of sex and desire and of great appeal to psychoanalysts, therapists and mental health professionals. (shrink)

Ataxia‐telangiectasia (A‐T) is a pleiotropic recessive disorder characterized cerebellar ataxia, immunodeficiency, specific developmental defects, profound predisposition to cancer and acute radiosensitivity. Functional inactivation of single gene product, ATM, accounts for this compound phenotype. We suggest that ATM acts as a sensor of reactive oxygen species and/or oxidative damage cellular macromolecules, including DNA. In turn, ATM induces signalling through multiple pathways, thereby coordinating acute phase stress responses with cell cycle checkpoint control and repair of oxidative damage. Absence of ATM is proposed (...) to limit the repair of insidious oxidative damage that can occur under normal physiological conditions, ultimately leading to apoptosis of particularly sensitive cells, such as neurons and thymocytes. (shrink)

本书系作者专心致志撰写22年而成的150余万字的《新伦理学》(商务印书馆2008年修订版)之精粹。它几乎将每个理论问题都化为一个鲜活的人生案例,通过解析各个案例而系统展现伦理学博大精深之原理,因而名之 为《伦理学与人生》。.

From Descartes to Spinoza, Western philosophers have attempted to propose an axiomatic systemization of ethics. However, without consensus on the contents and objects of ethics, the system remains incomplete. This four-volume set presents a model that highlights a Chinese philosopher's insights on ethics after a 22 year study. Three essential components of ethics are examined: metaethics, normative ethics, and virtue ethics. This volume is the second part of the discussion on normative ethics. The author analyzes humanity, liberty, justice, happiness, and (...) systems of moral rules. He puts forward 26 value standards that construct a system of measuring state instruction; reveals the relationship between humanity, liberty and justice; puts forward three objective laws of happiness; and discusses the goodness of important moral rules, such as honesty, self-respect and courage. This set is an essential read for students and scholars of ethics and philosophy in general. (shrink)

We present experimental evidence that supports the thesis :602–625, 2015, Br J Philos Sci 70:77–102, 2019; Bradley in Decisions theory with a human face, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2017; Goldschmidt and Nissan-Rozen in Synthese 198:7553–7575, 2021) that people might positively or negatively desire risky prospects conditional on only some of the prospects’ outcomes obtaining. We argue that this evidence has important normative implications for the central debate in normative decision theory between two general approaches on how to rationalize several common (...) patterns of preference, which are ruled out as irrational by orthodox decision theory, namely the re-individuation approach and the non-expected utility approach. (shrink)

Many philosophers in the field of meta-ethics believe that rational degrees of confidence in moral judgments should have a probabilistic structure, in the same way as do rational degrees of belief. The current paper examines this position, termed “moral Bayesianism,” from an empirical point of view. To this end, we assessed the extent to which degrees of moral judgments obey the third axiom of the probability calculus, ifP(A∩B)=0thenP(A∪B)=P(A)+P(B), known as finite additivity, as compared to degrees of beliefs on the one (...) hand and degrees of desires on the other. Results generally converged to show that degrees of moral judgment are more similar to degrees of belief than to degrees of desire in this respect. This supports the adoption of a Bayesian approach to the study of moral judgments. To further support moral Bayesianism, we also demonstrated its predictive power. Finally, we discuss the relevancy of our results to the meta-ethical debate between moral cognitivists and moral non-cognitivists. (shrink)

Based on a survey of 6,989 individuals aged 60 and up from six countries (Austria, Denmark, Israel, the Netherlands, Romania and Spain), this study aimed at exploring the extent to which digital media practices complement and/or replace print media among older internet users. Results indicated a relative strength of print media among this audience and pointed to four differentiated sub-segments: hybrid readers—who comprised the majority of sample respondents—, heavy print readers, heavy online readers and non-readers. The segment type significantly associated (...) with sociodemographic characteristics. The findings indicate that older readers are not a homogenous group and that their reading habits are affected by a complex configuration of factors: technological features of different media, specific individual psychosocial needs, unequal allocation of cultural capital among varied social groups that results in different levels and types of literacy, and—at least to some extent—idiosyncratic cultural and political conditions in each country. (shrink)

This paper provides a new account of positive versus negative antonyms. The data includes well-known linguistic generalizations regarding negative adjectives, such as their incompatibility with measure phrases (cf. two meters tall/ *short) and ratio phrases (twice as tall/ #short) as well as the impossibility of truly crosspolar comparisons (*Dan is taller than Sam is short). These generalizations admit a variety of exceptions, e.g., positive adjectives that do not license measure phrases (cf. #two degrees warm/cold) and rarely also negative adjectives that (...) do (cf. two hours late/early). Furthermore, new corpus data is presented regarding the use of twice with positive and negative adjectives. The analysis the paper presents supposes that grammar associates gradable adjectives with measure functions—mapping of entities to a set of degrees isomorphic to the real numbers (Kennedy, Projecting the adjective: The syntax and semantics of gradability and comparison, 1999). On this analysis, negative adjectives map entities to values that are linearly reversed and linearly transformed in comparison with their values in the positive antonyms. As shown, the generalizations, as well as their exceptions, directly follow. Negative polarity is explained in terms of function reversal, and non-licensing of measure phrases is explained in terms of transformation by an unspecified value. (shrink)

This article explores the socio-ethical concerns raised by the familial searching of forensic databases in criminal investigations, from the perspective of family and kinship studies. It discusses the broader implications of this expanded understanding for wider debates about identity, privacy and genetic databases.

The rise of AI-based systems has been accompanied by the belief that these systems are impartial and do not suffer from the biases that humans and older technologies express. It becomes evident, however, that gender and racial biases exist in some AI algorithms. The question is where the bias is rooted—in the training dataset or in the algorithm? Is it a linguistic issue or a broader sociological current? Works in feminist philosophy of technology and behavioral economics reveal the gender bias (...) in AI technologies as a multi-faceted phenomenon, and the linguistic explanation as too narrow. The next step moves from the linguistic aspects to the relational ones, with postphenomenology. One of the analytical tools of this theory is the “I-technology-world” formula that models our relations with technologies, and through them—with the world. Realizing that AI technologies give rise to new types of relations in which the technology has an “enhanced technological intentionality”, a new formula is suggested: “I-algorithm-dataset.” In the third part of the article, four types of solutions to the gender bias in AI are reviewed: ignoring any reference to gender, revealing the considerations that led the algorithm to decide, designing algorithms that are not biased, or lastly, involving humans in the process. In order to avoid gender bias, we can recall a feminist basic understanding—visibility matters. Users and developers should be aware of the possibility of gender and racial biases, and try to avoid them, bypass them, or exterminates them altogether. (shrink)

The purpose of this article is to explore the epistemological foundations of narrative research in education. In particular, I seek to explain how one can obtain knowledge, given its origin in teachers' subjective experiences. The problem with rhetorical and aesthetic criteria that narrative researchers use to warrant their knowledge claims is not that they don't meet a correspondence criterion of truth as post-positivists contend, but rather that they fail to connect teachers' ethical views with their practice. Since narrative research is (...) aimed at understanding teachers' actions and not at seeking some kind of mechanism in teachers' behaviour, the link between past experiences and present teaching practice is not causal but teleological. I suggest that although the knowledge claims of narrative researchers may not be justified (because they don't meet the criteria of truth as correspondence theory), we might nonetheless be intellectually entitled to accept them. Entitlement is an epistemic right or warrant that constitutes knowledge as justification, but uses different reasons—teleological not causal explanations. I offer three criteria to establish entitlement to accept narrative researchers' findings: (1) the meeting of rhetorical standards such as plausibility, adequacy, and persuasion; (2) the inclusion of teachers' stories about their pedagogical practice; (3) the meeting of ethical criteria that connects a teacher's actions to an articulate and defensible end-in-view or vision of the good. (shrink)

This engaging work of comparative philosophy puts the Chinese and American philosophical traditions into a mutually informative and transformative philosophical dialogue on the way to developing a new form of Confucian pragmatism.

This book is the first postphenomenological analysis of the important roles the cellphone plays in contemporary everydayness. It is an example of a new methodology to study everyday technologies that combines historical research with a philosophical investigation.

If, at the outset, we postulate the totality of Jewish thought and lay down the principle of its organic unity and its call to universalism, thus asserting the active solidarity which dominates its relations with Jewish religious and intellectual life in the Maghreb, if we state that both have a privileged interrelationship and use the same modes of expression, then we must add that Maghrebian Judaism is an integral part of the intellectual space, the cultural landscape and the civilization of (...) the Muslim West where it was born, blossomed and bore fruit. (shrink)

The author encountered evocations of suffering and death in all the studies and research he devoted, over 40 or so years, to the intellectual, social and religious life of western Muslim Judaism, and indeed the whole of traditional Jewish thought and its varied modes of expression: rabbinical law, Hebrew poetry, the literature of homily and preaching, mystical writings and the kabbala, dialect and popular literatures in Judeo-Arabic and Judeo-Berber. Some passages are taken from the Zohar (‘The town the angel of (...) death cannot enter’, for instance). The author also refers to the Talmud and magic therapeutics, the power of sacred names, Jewish and Muslim miracle workers, hunting down and casting out demons, etc. Agony, refusal to die, joyous commemoration of death, the cemetery and the cult of the dead, Judeo-Muslim pilgrimages, the wealth of the customs, beliefs and rites of the past lead the author to reflect on the question of death in the present-day world. (shrink)

"מהדורה מוערת ומבוארת של ספר מגלה טמירין על פי דפוס ראשון, כתבי יד מפוזרים, והשוואה לנוסח הספר ביידיש. לספר נלווה כרך מיוחד של נספחים שנוגעים להתהוות הספר ולתכניו, וכלולים בו דיונים עקרוניים שקשורים לכמה סוגיות שעולות בו: מדרש השמות המוצפנים, מקורותיו החסידיים של המחבר, הנוסחים השונים בכתב-יד, והנוסח המיוחד של הספר ביידיש" -- מעטפת אחורית.

本书指出科学的伦理学有三个组成部分:一、道德实体,即伦理行为事实如何;二、道德主体,即道德目的,社会为何制定道德;三、道德价值,即伦理行为应该如何。本书一方面揭示了人类伦理行为的类型及其所遵循的四大规 律;另一方面从社会创建道德的目的中推导出了人类伦理行为的善恶六原则以及公平、平等、自由、异化等治理社会的道德原则和幸福、贵生等善待自己的道德原则。.

Deep neural networks (DNNs) are powerful computational models, which generate complex, high-level representations that were missing in previous models of human cognition. By studying these high-level representations, psychologists can now gain new insights into the nature and origin of human high-level vision, which was not possible with traditional handcrafted models. Abandoning DNNs would be a huge oversight for psychological sciences.

Writing is frequently analyzed as a mode of communication. But writing can be done for personal reasons, to remind oneself of things to do, of thoughts, of events. The cellphone has revealed this shift, commencing as a communication device and ending up as a memory prosthesis that records what we see, hear, read and think. The recordings are not necessarily for communicating a message to others, but sometimes just for oneself. Today, when machine learning algorithms read, write and transmit, a (...) new mode of communication arises that is not centered on the human. In this chapter the various phases of modern writing are modeled according to postphenomenology. As a branch of philosophy of technology, postphenomenology offers a set of analytical tools to study technologies and our relations to them. One of its central frameworks is the scheme of “I–technology–world.” The author proposes some modifications so that the scheme can systematically model the changes in the humans users, in machine learning algorithms imbued with non-human cognition and in the environments of readers, interlocutors and contexts. (shrink)

Digital technologies are frequently considered as lacking material aspects. Today, it is evident that behind digital technologies lies a huge and complex material infrastructure in the form of fiber optic cables, servers, satellites, and screens. Postphenomenology has theorized the relations to material things as embodiment relations. Taking into account that technologies can also have hermeneutic aspects, this theory defines hermeneutic relations as those in which we read the world through technologies. The article opens with a review of some theoretical developments (...) to hermeneutic relations with a special focus on digital technologies. The article suggests that in the digital world, material hermeneutics needs to be updated as it shifts from a scientific to an everyday technological context. Now, technologies not only “give voice” to things, they also produce new meanings to informational structures and direct users to certain meanings. When it comes to digital technologies, especially those involving artificial intelligence (AI), the technology actively mediates the world. In postphenomenological terms, it possesses a technological intentionality. The postphenomenological formula should be updated to reflect this type of technological intentionality, by reversing the arrow of intentionality so that it points to the user, rather than from the user. (shrink)

The impetus driving this article is the uncritical uses of ‘culture’ as an explanatory variable in public health research of ‘suicide’, regarding its conceptualization and operationalization as a mentally riddled phenomenon clamped in nomothetic and epidemiological nomenclature. This reduction of suicide to its presumed ‘evidence based’ figures and graphs under the guise of the lingo of culture requires and yields not only ‘thin’ understandings but also non-committal conclusions. Thus, ‘culture’ merely appears as a ‘thing’ made of shared norms and values (...) that arguably can be measured, computed, and even predicted in relation to tables of suicide rates. With the aim of critically un-disciplining and unleashing these two intersecting fuzzy concepts from the straits of their epistemological habitus, we set an alternative scene of relations between them that contribute to the re-conceptualization of both. ‘Suicide cultures’, a term we coined for highlighting temporal, agentive, performative, and social justice questions of suicide and culture, place the preoccupation with mortality and terminality at its core. This turn in the analysis of public health sheds a non-perfunctory light on the cultural parameters of counting of and accounting for the incidence of suicide in different social settings. (shrink)

In this reply to my reviewers, I touch upon Husserl’s notion of fantasy. Whereas Kant positions fantasy outside the scope of his own work, Husserl brings it back. The importance of this notion lies in freeing imagination from the tight link to images, as for Husserl imagination is an activity that functions as a “quasi perception.” Ihde and Stiegler enrich Husserl’s analysis of imagination with various aspects of technology: Ihde shows how changes in the technologies that mediate our imagination will (...) necessarily change our imagination; Stiegler broadens Husserl’s analysis of retention. The two theories can be combined into a new understanding of subjectivity that is modeled as layers. Some layers can be performed by AI. The second part deals with the question of whether AI can be imaginative. Traditionally, imaginative creativity is associated with art. Bioart and AI art are brought as examples of a new definition of art, according to which art is the arrangement of materials in a way that produces a meaning. This definition does not refer specifically to creativity. In both forms of art, the biological/artificial and the human cooperate so that the former arranges the materials and the latter produces the meaning, albeit this division of labor is not clear-cut. The result is a co-shaping process. My conclusion is that algorithms can be considered creative by human standards, but this entails a new mode of imagination that is co-shaped and co-shared by humans and algorithms. The layer paradigm explains how such co-shaping works in practice. (shrink)

This article analyzes the use of crowdsourcing to promote corporate sustainability by assessing compliance with supply chain disclosure laws. It draws on a case study of WikiRate.org as a novel example of crowdsourcing compliance with respect to the UK Modern Slavery Act and U.S. conflict minerals legislation (section 1502 of the Dodd-Frank Financial Reform Act). WikiRate is an open research platform whose mission is to crowdsource better companies by motivating corporations to be transparent about their environmental, social, and governance performance. (...) In particular, WikiRate’s projects on modern slavery and conflict minerals harness the power of citizens to evaluate the quality of corporate disclosures produced in accordance with these laws. Following an analysis of its projects on modern slavery and conflict minerals, I evaluate the challenges of using crowdsourcing to assess legal compliance, including the potential manipulation of data and the difficulty of relying on non-expert citizens to assess complex information in corporate disclosures. I argue that one must identify the appropriate “crowd” that would be most capable of assessing compliance with a given law. While crowdsourcing platforms such as WikiRate invite a broad range of stakeholders to assess compliance, the reality is that only a limited set of individuals may be able to meaningfully participate given the complexity of supply chain disclosures. Thus, “expertsourcing” may be a more appropriate tool for assessing compliance with certain laws as it limits participation to citizens with specialized expertise. (shrink)

Public procurement provides an excellent window into the shaping of corporate social responsibility of companies contracted by the government. To this emerging scholarly realization, we want to add that public procurement provides also the opportunity to examine corporate social responsibility as practiced by public sector organizations. This opportunity enables the investigation of the conditions under which public sector organizations endorse CSR guidelines, adherence to which demonstrates accountability for their service providers’ legal, employment-related practices. Our study examined the possibility that public (...) sector organizations’ CSR is enhanced by maintenance managers’ role dissonance emerging in response to an ethical mismatch between them and their organizations’ official stance concerning whether unethical employment practices of service providers should be sanctioned. We analyzed interviews with 13 managers in charge of contract administration in the area of cleaning and maintenance. Our findings suggest that the role dissonance that emerges in cases of mismatch in ethical orientation rarely enhances more responsible treatment of cleaning employees. We introduce a model indicating the conditions supporting this incident. (shrink)

In this work we give a complete answer as to the possible implications between some natural properties of Lebesgue measure and the Baire property. For this we prove general preservation theorems for forcing notions. Thus we answer a decade-old problem of J. Baumgartner and answer the last three open questions of the Kunen-Miller chart about measure and category. Explicitly, in \S1: (i) We prove that if we add a Laver real, then the old reals have outer measure one. (ii) We (...) prove a preservation theorem for countable-support forcing notions, and using this theorem we prove (iii) If we add ω 2 Laver reals, then the old reals have outer measure one. From this we obtain (iv) $\operatorname{Cons}(\mathrm{ZF}) \Rightarrow \operatorname{Cons}(\mathrm{ZFC} + \neg B(m) + \neg U(m) + U(c))$ . In \S2: (i) We prove a preservation theorem, for the finite support forcing notion, of the property " $F \subseteq ^\omega\omega$ is an unbounded family." (ii) We introduce a new forcing notion making the old reals a meager set but the old members of ω ω remain an unbounded family. Using this we prove (iii) $\operatorname{Cons}(\mathrm{ZF}) \Rightarrow \operatorname{Cons}(\mathrm{ZFC} + U(m) + \neg B(c) + \neg U(c) + C(c))$ . In \S3: (i) We prove a preservation theorem, for the finite support forcing notion, of a property which implies "the union of the old measure zero sets is not a measure zero set," and using this theorem we prove (ii) $\operatorname{Cons}(\mathrm{ZF}) \Rightarrow \operatorname{Cons}(\mathrm{ZFC} + \neg U(m) + C(m) + \neg C(c))$. (shrink)