This article tells the story of attempts to improve the regulation of lawyers in Victoria, Australia 1975-2012. It also tells the parallel story of one Victorian solicitor, Issac Brott, who was the subject of multiple complaints about his conduct during that same period of time but against whom professional discipline proved both ineffective and irrelevant.

This paper investigates Isaac Newton's rather unique account of God's relation to matter. According to this account, corpuscles depend on a substantially omnipresent God endowing quantities of objective space with the qualities of shape, solidity, the unfaltering tendency to move in accord with certain laws, and—significantly—the power to interact with created minds. I argue that there are important similarities and differences between Newton's account of matter and Berkeley's idealism. And while the role played by the divine will might at first (...) appear to be a species of occasionalism, I conclude that there are, for Newton, genuine causal relations between minds and bodies. Ultimately, to fully appreciate this account of the creation and persistence of matter, we must consider not only Newton's metaphysical writings, but also his sensorium theory of mind-body interaction, his heterodox theological commitments, and the influences of Descartes, More, and Locke. (shrink)

This book review describes and evaluates Issac Levi's views about belief revision.

Medical practice is poised to incorporate genomescale testing into treatment decisions. However, broad genome testing in laboratories may lead to discoveries not anticipated, yet highly significant to the health of the patient. Understanding the complexity of our genome and its relationship to our health is an overwhelming task. Currently, much of the effort to unravel this complexity is in the realm of research. However, researchers are often neither qualified nor prepared to deal with incidental findings of genetic abnormalities that influence (...) health and disease. These incidental observations, referred to recently by Issac Kohane et al. as the “incidentalome,” may lead to complex legal, ethical, and financial problems that may seriously complicate the role of the research community in medical genomics. Currently, most genetics researchers, while aware of the potential for incidental findings, simply do not want to deal with them. (shrink)

Physical scientists were driven during the late twenties to abandon a fundamental idea that had reigned since the time of Issac Newton To obtain a rationally coherent and practically useful theory of all physical phenomena they turned to a pragmatic approach The core idea was that the basic physical theory was no longer directly about a physical world that was conceived to exists apart from anyone s knowledge of it Rather the theory was regarded as being directly about certain (...) of our knowings This switch appears to be exactly what is needed to establish a rationally coherent theoretical foundation for the science of consciousness For it converts the immediate objects of psychological and physical theories into things of the same kind namely human experiencings rather than things of disparate kinds separated by an unbridgable conceptual gap Within this pragmatic quantum approach certain particular aspects of human brain structure entail the existence of macroscopic quantum e ects that are linked to our conscious experiences Moreover our conscious thoughts have causal e ects that can both enhance our prospects of survival and work e ectively against thermal noise in the creation of the brain states that guide our behaviour.. (shrink)

On the basis of evidence drawn from the Waste book, Westfall and Nicholas have argued that Newton arrived at his second law of motion by reflecting on the implications of the first law. I analyze another argument in the Waste book which reveals that Newton also arrived at the second law by another very different route. On this route, it is the consideration of the third law and the principle of conservation of motion—and not the first law—that prompts Newton to (...) formulate the second law. The existence of these two routes is significant because each employs a distinct kind of reasoning about forces. Whereas the Nicholas–Westfall route via the principle of inertia bears the mark of Descartes’s influence, the alternative route proceeds from the action–reaction principle, which is widely regarded as an original Newtonian contribution to mechanics. In the course of exploring this alternate route to the second law, the origins and justification of the third law are examined.Keywords: Issac Newton; Waste book; Third law of motion; Second law of motion; Richard Westfall; John Nicholas. (shrink)

This book is an investigation into authenticity, certainty, and self-hood as they arise in the story of the binding of Isaac. Gellman provides a new interpretation of Kierkegaard with select Hasidic commentary. Contents: INTRODUCTION: Background to the Book; Hasidism and Existentialism; Preview of the Chapters; THE FEAR AND THE TREMBLING: Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling; The Problem of Hearing and the Problem of Choice; The 'Ethical' for Kierkegaard; The 'Voice of God' for Kierkegaard; The Resolution of the Problems; THE UNCERTAINTY: Mordecai (...) Joseph Leiner of Izbica; Maimonides, Saadia, and Gersonides; The Existentialist Interpretation; The Theological Interpretation; SINNING FOR GOD: The Teleological Suspension of the Ethical; Averah Lishmah-Mordecai Joseph Leiner of Izbica and Zadok Hakohen of Lublin; Divine Determinism; Repentance from Fear and from Love; Averah Lishmah and the Teleological Suspension of the Ethical; THE DOUBLE-MINDEDNESS: Abraham's Prophetic Utterance; Heavy and Light Double Mindedness; The Fire-Elimelech of Lyzhansk; Judah Aryeh Leib of Gur; Abraham's Double-Mindedness; THE PASSION: Abraham Issac Kook; Hegel and Kierkegaard on Religion and Philosophy; Abraham and Idolatry; The Akedah According to Rav Kook; God's Mercy; Rav Kook and Kierkegaard on the Self; Index. (shrink)

Stephen Edelston Toulmin, philosopher and historian of science, pioneer in the logical analysis of substantive argumentation, was educated in physics and philosophy at Cambridge, where he studied with Paul Dirac, John Wisdom and Ludwig Wittgenstein. Cambridge, Issac Newton’s university, remained his philosophical home: he always was very critical of the way that philosophy was done at The Other Place, as Oxford is known there. The only philosopher whom he really revered there was John Austin – although it is necessary (...) hastily to add that he deeply respected Gilbert Ryle and Isaiah Berlin. Like the latter, he considered himself a “public intellectual”. As such he was delighted to be invited to become a contributor to Encounter and later, from the mid-1960s a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books. He was fascinated by Wittgenstein, attending as many of his classes as he could, but had no interest in becoming close to him. Both the idea of discipleship and Wittgenstein’s dominating personally were uncongenial to him. Like Wittgenstein and Berlin he was never at home among professional philosophers . On occasion his relationships with philosophers could be stormy indeed as was the case with Sir Karl Popper and Nelson Goodman. He prided himself on being an amateur and was only mildly disturbed when “experts” chided him as a bungler. His deepest belief was that professional philosophers do not determine what the real problems of philosophy are; rather those problems arise out of conundrums in human life. That meant for him engaging in intense dialogues, with physicists, psychologists, psychoanalysts, medical doctors, lawyers, musician artists and, of course, historians of science. (shrink)

Stanovich & West (S&W) are wrong to think that all “reject-the-norm” theorists simply wish to reduce the normative/descriptive gap. They have misunderstood Issac Levi's reasons for rejecting Tversky and Kahneman's normative assumptions in the “base-rate” experiments. In their discussion of the taxicab experiment, (S&W) erroneously claim that subjects' responses indicate whether they have reasoned in accordance with Bayesian principles or not.