Jaques provides a general theory that gives a dynamic scientific foundation for the understanding of all living behavior.

The 'More-than-Human' reader brings together texts by writers across a wide array of disciplines that reflect on the state of post-anthropocentric thinking today. Focusing on the ecologies and technologies of climate injustice and inequalities, as well as the destructive structures lurking within anthropocentrism, More-than-Human proposes complex entanglements, frictions, and reparative attention across species and beings. Thinking past the centrality of the human subject, the texts that compose this reader begin to imagine networks of ethics and responsibility emerging not from the (...) ideologies of old, but from the messy and complex liveliness around us, and underfoot. (shrink)

Platonism is the most pervasive philosophy of mathematics. Indeed, it can be argued that an inarticulate, half-conscious Platonism is nearly universal among mathematicians. The basic idea is that mathematical entities exist outside space and time, outside thought and matter, in an abstract realm. In the more eloquent words of Edward Everett, a distinguished nineteenth-century American scholar, "in pure mathematics we contemplate absolute truths which existed in the divine mind before the morning stars sang together, and which will continue to exist (...) there when the last of their radiant host shall have fallen from heaven." In What is Mathematics, Really?, renowned mathematician Rueben Hersh takes these eloquent words and this pervasive philosophy to task, in a subversive attack on traditional philosophies of mathematics, most notably, Platonism and formalism. Virtually all philosophers of mathematics treat it as isolated, timeless, ahistorical, inhuman. Hersh argues the contrary, that mathematics must be understood as a human activity, a social phenomenon, part of human culture, historically evolved, and intelligible only in a social context. Mathematical objects are created by humans, not arbitrarily, but from activity with existing mathematical objects, and from the needs of science and daily life. Hersh pulls the screen back to reveal mathematics as seen by professionals, debunking many mathematical myths, and demonstrating how the "humanist" idea of the nature of mathematics more closely resembles how mathematicians actually work. At the heart of the book is a fascinating historical account of the mainstream of philosophy--ranging from Pythagoras, Plato, Descartes, Spinoza, and Kant, to Bertrand Russell, David Hilbert, Rudolph Carnap, and Willard V.O. Quine--followed by the mavericks who saw mathematics as a human artifact, including Aristotle, Locke, Hume, Mill, Peirce, Dewey, and Lakatos. In his epilogue, Hersh reveals that this is no mere armchair debate, of little consequence to the outside world. He contends that Platonism and elitism fit well together, that Platonism in fact is used to justify the claim that "some people just can't learn math." The humanist philosophy, on the other hand, links mathematics with geople, with society, and with history. It fits with liberal anti-elitism and its historical striving for universal literacy, universal higher education, and universal access to knowledge and culture. Thus Hersh's argument has educational and political ramifications. Written by the co-author of The Mathematical Experience, which won the American Book Award in 1983, this volume reflects an insider's view of mathematical life, based on twenty years of doing research on advanced mathematical problems, thirty-five years of teaching graduates and undergraduates, and many long hours of listening, talking to, and reading philosophers. A clearly written and highly iconoclastic book, it is sure to be hotly debated by anyone with a passionate interest in mathematics or the philosophy of science. (shrink)

This paper discusses the wide diversity of responses by different countries to COVID-19.

According to some views, natural language suffers from underdeterminacy, but thought doesn’t. According to the underdeterminacy claim, sentence types underdetermine the truth-conditions of sentence tokens. In particular, the semantics of a predicate type seems to underdetermine the satisfaction conditions of its tokens. By contrast, mental representation-types are supposed to determine the truth-conditions of its tokens. In this paper I critically examine these mixed views. First, I argue that the arguments supporting the indispensability of including in one’s theory mental representations that (...) are free of the underdeterminacy exhibited by natural language are not sound. As a result, the possibility that mental representation-types are as underdetermined as natural language sentence-types has not been ruled out. Second, I argue that Carston’s ad hoc concept-types are as underdetermined as word-types. I finish by arguing that mental representations are also underdetermined in a second sense—mental representation-tokens only determine a partial function from possible worlds to truth-values. (shrink)

According to contextualists, communication has to do with pragmatically adjusted content, not with conventional meaning. This pragmatic content is sometimes identified with speaker meaning or with the thought the speaker intends to express. I will argue that given the sociolinguistic role of utterance content—the fact it provides reasons for action, liabilities and entitlements—locutionary content should not be modelled as a variety of speaker meaning.

It is explained that, in the sense of the sociologist Erving Goffman, mathematics has a front and a back. Four pervasive myths about mathematics are stated. Acceptance of these myths is related to whether one is located in the front or the back.

"This new collection of essays edited by Reuben Hersh contains frank facts and opinions from leading mathematicians, philosophers, sociologists, cognitive ...

According to contextualists, communication has to do with pragmatically adjusted content, not with conventional meaning. This pragmatic content is sometimes identified with speaker meaning or with the thought the speaker intends to express. I will argue that given the sociolinguistic role of utterance content—the fact it provides reasons for action, liabilities and entitlements—locutionary content should not be modelled as a variety of speaker meaning.

There are two distinct meanings to ‘mathematical proof’. The connection between them is an unsolved problem. The first step in attacking it is noticing that it is an unsolved problem.

This paper investigates four questions related to ethical issues associated with the involvement of engineers and scientists in 'military work', including the influence of ethical values and beliefs, the role of gendered perspectives and moves beyond the purely technical. It fits strongly into a human (and planet)-centred systems perspective and extends my previous AI and Society papers on othering and narrative ethics, and ethics and social responsibility. It has two main contributions. The first involves an analysis of the literature through (...) the application of different ethical theories and the application of gendered analysis to discussion of masculinities in engineering and the military. The second is a survey of scientists and engineers to investigate their opinions and experiences. The conclusions draw together the results of these two contributions to provide preliminary responses to the four questions and include a series of recommendations covering education and training, ethical approval of work not involving human participants or animals, the need for organisational support, approaches covering wider perspectives and the encouragement of individual ethical commitment. (shrink)

The paper discusses the limitations of engineering ethics as implemented in practice, with a focus on the fact that engineering and other activities are carried out without any consideration of whether the activities are themselves ethical, and on the gap between legality and ethics. This leads to the following three central ideas of the paper. The first is the need for engineers to both be aware of and critique their own values and be able to widen their perspective to that (...) of the ‘other’, i.e., marginalised and minority groups and the environment. This understanding of the ‘other’ and values is also applied to the discussion of ethical issues relating to minority world (‘developed’) country engineers working in majority world (‘developing’) countries. The second central idea is the fact that structural and contextual factors in the form of barriers and enablers affect ethical values and practices. Individuals are not necessarily unethical in themselves, but the context and organisational ethos may present barriers to ethical behaviour and encourage the development of unethical values. These barriers and enablers are investigated through a pilot survey. The third central idea is the relationship between individual and collective responsibility and the need for support to enable engineers to think and behave ethically. (shrink)

The paper presents a new seven-step methodology for using narrative ethics and two case studies illustrating its application. A brief discussion of the importance of ethics to engineers and the need to consider outcomes and macroethics introduce the paper. This is followed by overviews of the literature on narrative ethics, the ethics of care, and virtue ethics and moral exemplars. The ethics of care and virtue ethics are included due to their relationship to narrative and the fact they are probably (...) less known to many engineers than other types of ethical theories. The paper also considers the important issues of culture, diversity and the ‘other’ and the need for support and collective responsibility. Understanding diversity and the ‘other’ are very important for engineers for a number of reasons, including the need to design technologies, goods and services for people who are not engineers and who are also different from them on other characteristics, such as gender, race and disability. Although ethical behaviour is often portrayed as an individual responsibility, it is much easier to behave ethically in a context which supports and encourages ethical behaviour. Collective action is frequently more effective than individual action and can prevent victimisation. (shrink)

This is a response to Dr Charlotte Rosalind Blease's paper ‘Electroconvulsive Therapy (ECT), the Placebo Effect and Informed Consent’, written by Julie K. Hersh who has had ECT. Hersh argues that placebo effect is impossible to prove without endangering the lives of participants in the study. In addition, informing potential ECT patients of unproven placebo effect could discourage patients from using a procedure that from experience has proven highly effective.

Historians and economists will find here what their fields have in common - the movement since the 1950s known variously as 'cliometrics', 'economic history', or 'historical economics'. A leading figure in the movement, Donald McCloskey, has compiled, with the help of George Hersh and a panel of distinguished advisors, a highly comprehensive bibliography of historical economics covering the period up until 1980. The book will be useful to all economic historians, as well as quantitative historians, applied economists, historical demographers, (...) business historians, national income accountants, and social historians. (shrink)

It is argued that there can only be a small-finite number of mathematical objects; that these objects range from the very concrete to the very abstract; and that mathematics is essentially not concerned with objects but with concepts. This viewpoint is described as "mentalist" and is upheld over Platonism, intuitionism, and formalism.

Among the universal attributes of homo sapiens, several have become established as special fields of study—language, art and music, religion, and political economy. But mathematics, another universal attribute of our species, is still modeled separately by logicians, historians, neuroscientists, and others. Could it be integrated into “mathematics studies,” a coherent, many-faceted branch of empirical science? Could philosophers facilitate such a unification? Some philosophers of mathematics identify themselves with “positions” on the nature of mathematics. Those “positions” could more productively serve as (...) models of mathematics. (shrink)

This text is a result of two long conversations between Ferran Adrià and Jèssica Jaques at elBulliLab, the creativity laboratory directed by the Catalan cook, in January, 2016. It has been translated from Catalan by Tiam Goudarzi under the supervision of the author.

Çalışma İslam hukukunun çevre ve toplumların sahip olduğu tabi kay-nakları koruma konusunda öngördüğü düzenlemelerin fıkhi ve iktisadi boyutunu açıklamayı hedef almaktadır. Araştırmamız esnasında inceledeğimiz temel dini metinler ve bunlar arasında yaptığımız karşılaştırmalar bize İslam hukukunun çevreyi ve tabi kaynakları koruma ve geliştirmeye yönelik düzenlemelere sahip olduğunu ortaya koymaktadır. Bu çalışma gösteriyor ki İslam'ın ilkeleri ve şeriat çevreye önem vermeye, özen göstermeye, tüketimde orta yolu gözetmeye ve israf yapmamaya davet etmektedir. Aynı şekilde kalkınmaya ve yeryüzünü imar etmeye ve ekonomik yararlarını gerçekleştirecek (...) şekilde ümmetin kaynaklarını korumaya da davet etmektedir. (shrink)

In my article on proof [Philosophia Mathematica (3) 5 (1997), 153—165], I suggested or intimated that computer proofs of mathematical theorems had been found only for relatively simple or trivial theorems. I am obligated to Martin Davis and R. S. Boyer for the information that this suggestion or intimation is incorrect. For instance, a machine proof of quadratic reciprocity was published by D. M. Russinoff in J. Automated Reasoning 8 (1992), 3–21. A machine proof of the unsolvability of the halting (...) problem has been published by R S. Boyer and J. S. Moore. This and many other examples are presented in Chapter 1 of their book, A Computational Logic Handbook, Academic Press, 1990. A second edition of this book is expected shortly. (shrink)

Ensuring that their work has a positive influence on society is a responsibility and a privilege for engineers, but also a considerable challenge. This book addresses the ways in which engineers meet this challenge, working from the assumption that for a project to be truly ethical both the undertaking itself and its implementation must be ethically sound. The contributors discuss varied topics from an international and interdisciplinary perspective, including: · robot ethics; · outer space; · international development; · internet privacy (...) and security; · green branding; · arms conversion; · green employment; and · deliberate misinformation about climate change Important questions are answered, such as: · what is meant by engineering ethics and its practical implications; · how decisions made by engineers in their working lives make an impact at the global as well as the local level; and · what ethics-related questions should be asked before making such decisions. Engineering Ethics, International and Environmental Stability will be a valuable resource for practising and student engineers as well as all who are interested in professional ethics, especially as it relates to engineering. Researchers and policy makers concerned with the effects of engineering decisions on environmental sustainability and international stability will find this book to be of special interest. (shrink)

Open peer commentary on the target article “Who Conceives of Society?” by Ernst von Glasersfeld. First paragraph: Ernst von Glasersfeld seems to say to social constructivists, “You attribute reality to society, but your society is just another construct, all you know is just the bits of light and shadow and color that your visual system provides to you.” Now, “society” is just a big word for “other people.” I can give to this text of von Glasersfeld’s either a short answer (...) or a long one. (shrink)

John Rawls, in his Political Liberalism (1993), claims that his justice-as-fairness prescription for liberal democracy does not require its citizens to harbor doubts regarding the truth claims of their religious, philosophical, or moral comprehensive doctrines. Citizens, he says, need not be “hesitant or uncertain, much less skeptical, about [their] own beliefs.” This claim is necessary for the protection of liberty of conscience, a “primary goods”, but it is also necessary to his description of his scheme as a “reasonable utopia” since (...) citizens are not likely to agree to a demand for skepticism. The problem arises for Rawls’s scheme when he says that for a citizen to participate in this political process she must be “reasonable” and that to qualify as “reasonable”, she must acknowledge what Rawls calls the “burdens of judgment” (that is, “limits on what can be reasonably justified to others”). This acknowledgment allows her not only to qualify as reasonable herself, but forces her to concede the reasonableness of other citizens who hold different truth claims from her own. Rawls’s fourth “burden of conscience” is an admission that the truth claims of all citizens, including her own, are conditioned by what Rawls calls her “total experience”. Unless she is willing to make the admission that her truth claims are contingent, a citizen cannot qualify as “reasonable” and is excluded from the conversation of public reason whose purpose is to produce a consensus on justice principles. This leaves his scheme in the category of “unreasonable utopias”. (shrink)

This paper examines two conflicts that emerge in the engagement between monotheism, especially as it is expressed in its fundamentalist form in both Christianity and Islam, and the separation of church and state. The first conflict involves intellectual compartmentalizing. The second conflict concerns the possibility that the contract may require that all "absolute truths" be assigned metaphorical status.

In this chapter, the authors engage in a dialogue on what constitutes mathematical practice from pre-Socratic Greeks onto the advent of natural philosophy. The conversation occurred through dialogues between the authors over the period 2016–2019. A coda with relevant content from the Origins section is provided.

This article furnishes a systematisation of the Mediaval aesthetic vocabulary. This task is developed by means of the adoption of a dynamic of intersection among the various Aristotelic species qualitatis, which are taken as the basic structural elements of the requested system. Two versions of beauty are established, which will expand into two kinds of aesthetics, one leaded by pulchritudo, with intellectualistic implications and the other leaded by formositas, which will turn into an autonomus aesthetics; both of them have let (...) a strong legacy to contemporaneus aesthetics. (shrink)