Peter Abelard (1079–1142 ce) was the most wide‐ranging philosopher of the twelfth century. He quickly established himself as a leading teacher of logic in and near Paris shortly after 1100. After his affair with Heloise, and his subsequent castration, Abelard became a monk, but he returned to teaching in the Paris schools until 1140, when his work was condemned by a Church Council at Sens. His logical writings were based around discussion of the “Old Logic”: Porphyry's Isagoge, aristotle'S Categories and (...) On Interpretation and boethius'S textbook on topical inference. They comprise a freestanding Dialectica (“Logic”; probably c.1116), a set of commentaries (known as the Logica [Ingredientibus], c. 1119) and a later (c. 1125) commentary on the Isagoge (Logica Nostrorum Petititoni Sociorum or Glossulae). In a work Abelard called his Theologia, issued in three main versions (between 1120 and c.1134), he attempted a logical analysis of trinitarian relations and explored the philosophical problems surrounding God's claims to omnipotence and omniscience. The Collationes (“Debates,” also known as “Dialogue between a Christian, a Philosopher and a Jew”; probably c.1130) present a rational investigation into the nature of the highest good, in which the Christian and the Philosopher (who seems to be modeled on a philosopher of pagan antiquity) are remarkably in agreement. The unfinished Scito teipsum (“Know thyself,” also known as the “Ethics”; c.1138) analyses moral action. (shrink)

Written in debate format, this book covers developing fields such as social cognition, as well as classic areas such as memory, learning, perception and categorization. The links between emotion and memory, learning, perception, categorization, social judgements, and behavior are addressed.

The American Constitution held out the hope that ordinary people were capable of deciding their own fates, and in doing so it immeasurably elevated the dignity of common people. The organization and interplay of the parts that comprise the whole American government exist to provide people the opportunity to govern themselves and, at the same time, reveal the limits of democratic self-rule. The forgetting of these limits is not only destructive to the constitution but the nation as a whole.

Despite some principal similarities, there is no systematic comparison between the different types of synesthesia . This comprehensive review compares the three principal types of synesthesia and focuses on their phenomenological features and their relation to different etiological models. Implications of this comparison for the validity of the different etiological models are discussed.Comparison of the three forms of synesthesia show many more differences than similarities. This is in contrast to their representation in the literature, where they are discussed in many (...) respects as being virtually similar. Noteworthy is the much broader spectrum and intensity with the typical drug-induced synesthesias compared to genuine and acquired synesthesias. A major implication of the phenomenological comparison in regard to the etiological models is that genuine and acquired synesthesias point to morphological substrates, while drug-induced synesthesia appears to be based on functional changes of brain activity. (shrink)

The Planteome project provides a suite of reference and species-specific ontologies for plants and annotations to genes and phenotypes. Ontologies serve as common standards for semantic integration of a large and growing corpus of plant genomics, phenomics and genetics data. The reference ontologies include the Plant Ontology, Plant Trait Ontology, and the Plant Experimental Conditions Ontology developed by the Planteome project, along with the Gene Ontology, Chemical Entities of Biological Interest, Phenotype and Attribute Ontology, and others. The project also provides (...) access to species-specific Crop Ontologies developed by various plant breeding and research communities from around the world. We provide integrated data on plant traits, phenotypes, and gene function and expression from 95 plant taxa, annotated with reference ontology terms. (shrink)

Quantum interference, manifest in the two slit experiment, lies at the heart of several quantum computational speed-ups and provides a striking example of a quantum phenomenon with no classical counterpart. An intriguing feature of quantum interference arises in a variant of the standard two slit experiment, in which there are three, rather than two, slits. The interference pattern in this set-up can be written in terms of the two and one slit patterns obtained by blocking one, or more, of the (...) slits. This is in stark contrast with the standard two slit experiment, where the interference pattern cannot be written as a sum of the one slit patterns. This was first noted by Rafael Sorkin, who raised the question of why quantum theory only exhibits irreducible interference in the two slit experiment. One approach to this problem is to compare the predictions of quantum theory to those of operationally-defined ‘foil’ theories, in the hope of determining whether theories that do exhibit higher-order interference suffer from pathological—or at least undesirable—features. In this paper two proposed extensions of quantum theory are considered: the theory of Density Cubes proposed by Dakić, Paterek and Brukner, which has been shown to exhibit irreducible interference in the three slit set-up, and the Quartic Quantum Theory of Życzkowski. The theory of Density Cubes will be shown to provide an advantage over quantum theory in a certain computational task and to posses a well-defined mechanism which leads to the emergence of quantum theory—analogous to the emergence of classical physics from quantum theory via decoherence. Despite this, the axioms used to define Density Cubes will be shown to be insufficient to uniquely characterise the theory. In comparison, Quartic Quantum Theory is a well-defined theory and we demonstrate that it exhibits irreducible interference to all orders. This feature of Życzkowski’s theory is argued not to be a genuine phenomenon, but to arise from an ambiguity in the current definition of higher-order interference in operationally-defined theories. Thus, to begin to understand why quantum theory is limited to a certain kind of interference, a new definition of higher-order interference is needed that is applicable to, and makes good operational sense in, arbitrary operationally-defined theories. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:?;5. HUME AND SPINOZA It is strange that there has been so little interest in comparing two great philosophers, Hume and -Spinoza, who were both so important and influential in bringing about the decline of traditional religion. Jessop's bibliography indicates no interest in Hume and Spinoza up to the 1930 's. The Hume conferences of 1976, as far as I have been able to 2 determine, avoided the topic. (...) In one of the better new Hume volumes, Livingston and King, Hume, A Re-evaluation, 3 Spinoza is cited twice, and once incorrectly at that. On the other hand, in the massive new Spinoza volume edited by Siegfried Hessing, Speculum Spinozanun 1677-1977, Hume is mentioned four times, but only one of these has any real relevance to Hume's views vis-a-vis Spinoza's. Some discussion of Hume's comments, usually brief, occurs in the commentators. B. M. Laing, in David Hume, (London 1932), has just three short references to Spinoza. John Laird, in Hume's Philosophy of Human Nature, (London 1932) has a couple of cursory references to Spinoza, plus a bit more extended statement of Pierre Bay le" s critique of him. In H. H. Price, Hume's Theory of the External World, (Oxford 1940), there is one paragraph on Hume and Spinoza. In Norman Kemp Smith, The Philosophy of David Hume (London 1941), there are three references to Spinoza. Rachel Kydd, Reason and Conduct in Hume's Treatise (Oxford 194 6), has the greatest number of references to Spinoza. She was concerned to compare him with Hume on other matters than are dealt with in this paper, namely Spinoza's theory of reason and 9 the passions. In contrast, André Leroy, David Hume, (Paris 1953), has just one paragraph on Spinoza dealing with the immateriality of the soul; and Ernest C. Mossner, in his monumental Life of David Hume, (Austin 1954), has only one reference to Spinoza - James Beattie's denunciation of Hume, Hobbes, Malebranche, Leibniz and Spinoza. Lastly, in a fairly recent commentary by James Noxon, Spinoza is mentioned 66. three times, but not for anything in Hume's text. Noxon does point out (p. 75) that Spinoza is not mentioned in ] 2 Hume's correspondence. John H. Randall has offered an explanation for this neglect of Spinoza by Hume scholars, namely that "Hume stands for all time as the antithesis of Spinoza in his thought". In the England of Hume's day, Spinoza was little known, but still better known at the time than he was in France or England. Spinoza's Tractatus Theologico-Politicus 14 had been twice translated into English anonymously. He had been attacked by Bishop Stillingfleet, by John Evelyn, by Berkeley and several others. But Spinoza was not a major figure, except to the English Deists, and to Hume's early patron, the Chevalier Andrew Michael Ramsay. Most of the information known about Spinoza came from Pierre Bayle' s Historical and Critical Dictionary, where the article "Spinoza" is the longest in the Dictionary, about three hundred pages in length. My suspicion, or hypothesis, is that Hume first became interested in Spinoza through Ramsay, and then learned what he knew about Spinoza from Bayle' s article. When the young David Hume went to France to write his A Treatise of Human Nature in 1734, he went first to see the Chevalier Ramsay, who entertained Hume for about two weeks. Ramsay was a leading Scottish Catholic, was the teacher of Bonnie Prince Charlie, a leading Scottish revolutionary, 18 as well as the Grand Master of the Free Masons. With Ramsay's eclectic views it is not odd that he had a serious interest in Spinoza's theory, and that he was composing answers to it. Ramsay advised Hume about his own book, and Hume felt he had to show Ramsay the Treatise before he 19 brought it back to England. In the Treatise there is a not too well studied section on Spinoza, Of the immateriality of the soul 20 (T240-45). In introducing Spinoza into the discussion of 67. the immateriality of the soul, Hume follows what was common practice in his day, namely to insult Spinoza and his theory... (shrink)

COLERIDGE AS PHILOSOPHER by JOHN H. MUIRHEAD M. A., GLASGOW AND OXFORD LL. D., GLASGOW AND CALIFORNIA EMERITUS PROFESSOR OF PHILOSOPHY IN THE UNIVERSITY OF..

The paper by Susan M. Wolf and Jeffrey P. Kahn published in this issue of the Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics notes that we are members of the Working Group on Genetic Testing in Disability Insurance and that the members of the Working Group do not necessarily subscribe to its recommendations. Although we agree with some of Wolf and Kahn's recommendations, we do not agree with recommendations 1, 3, 4, and 5 for individual disability insurance and recommendations 1, 2, (...) and 3 for group disability insurance. We use this paper to delineate our areas of disagreement, but we do not discuss areas such as employment law as they are not our areas of expertise.First, understanding our roles on the Working Group is important. As members, we provided technical expertise on disability insurance. Our input to the Working Group represents our individual opinions. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:BOOK REVIEWS Because we are critical realists, we must take this perspective on the world afforded by physics and cosmology seriously but not too literally. This means that in thinking how it might influence our models of God's relation to and actions in the world, it is only the broadest, general features, and these the most soundly established, that we must reckon with (60). 199 The trouble is, of (...) course, that in the version of critical realism developed in the first lecture, more confident of the reality of theoretical entities than of the truth of statements about them, it is just the most general theoretical features that we are least entitled to regard as " soundly established." Perhaps I have misunderstood Peacocke's version of critical realism; but, if so, it gets much less support from philosophers like Hacking and McMullin than he supposes. That the big picture is (probably close to) right, though the details might be wrong, is not what the realists among contemporary philosophers of science typically contendmore nearly the opposite. University of Houston Houston, Texas WILLIAM H. AUSTIN The Letters and Diaries of John Henry Newman, Vol. VI. Edited by GERARD TR.ACEY. New York: The Clarendon Press, Oxford University Press, 1984. Pp. 417. $49. 95. A Packet of Letters: A Selection from the Correspondence of John Henry Newman. Edited by JOYCE SUGG. New York: The Clarendon Press, Oxford University Press, 1983. Pp. 230. $19.95. Volume Six of Newman's letters and diaries documents the years 1837 and 1838 which, though far from the most eventful years of Newman's life, saw the culmination of a remarkable development of his influence, an influence which at the same time was warmly welcomed by some and stridently criticized by others. A visitor to Oxford in November of 1837 gave the following picture of Newman's position: It was allowed that the Doctor [Pusey] and Newman governed the University, and that nothing could withstand the influence of themselves and their friends. Every man of talent who during the last six years has come to Oxford has joined Newman, and when he preaches at St. Mary's (on every Sunday afternoon) all the men of talent in the University come to hear him, although at the loss of their dinner. His triumph over the mental empire of Oxford was said to be complete! (164) 200 llOOK' REVIEWS Newman no doubt would have explained that " triumph " in the same way he described a putative disciple of Pusey's-" he is Pusey's, only so far as Pusey is Truth's..." (175). But though he was an unwilling leader, he was a leader nevertheless. His influence, however, brought as much criticism as accolade; even Pusey felt sorry for the responsibility attributed to Newman, writing to Keble that" it is not fair to let Newman bear the whole brunt alone, as if his Theology were something peculiar, or ~they call it, the Newmania" (51, note 2). Pusey's sympathy was expressed in March of 1837; in November of 1838 we see Newman's own assessment-as if too exhausted to. hide his exasperation any longer, he wrote to Keble: I wish parties would seriously ask themselves what they desire of me.... People really should put themselves into my place, and consider how the appearance of suspicion, jealousy, and discontent is likely to affect one, who is most conscious that every thing he does is imperfect, and therefore soon begins so to suspect every thing that he does as to have no heart and little power remaining to do any thing at all. (347) He suffered under the general criticism that he was "betraying a cause and unsettling people " (307), and, even when he could recognize good as coming from his work, the benefit was an inferred, not a felt, one-he likened himself to " the pane of glass... which transmits heat yet is cold " (57). These letters show us a man who never found writing easy (192-3), yet wrote prolifically nonetheless; the year 1837 in particular was filled with such commitments. The Lectures on the Prophetical Office of the Church, viewed relatively to Romanism and Popular Protestantism (his attempt at a... (shrink)

This festschrift collects a number of insightful essays by a group of accomplished Christian scholars, all of who have either worked with or studied under Hendrik Hart during his 35-year tenure as Senior Member in Systematic Philosophy at the Institute for Christian Studies, Toronto, Canada.

We investigate the connection between interference and computational power within the operationally defined framework of generalised probabilistic theories. To compare the computational abilities of different theories within this framework we show that any theory satisfying four natural physical principles possess a well-defined oracle model. Indeed, we prove a subroutine theorem for oracles in such theories which is a necessary condition for the oracle model to be well-defined. The four principles are: causality, purification, strong symmetry, and informationally consistent composition. Sorkin has (...) defined a hierarchy of conceivable interference behaviours, where the order in the hierarchy corresponds to the number of paths that have an irreducible interaction in a multi-slit experiment. Given our oracle model, we show that if a classical computer requires at least n queries to solve a learning problem, because fewer queries provide no information about the solution, then the corresponding “no-information” lower bound in theories lying at the kth level of Sorkin’s hierarchy is \. This lower bound leaves open the possibility that quantum oracles are less powerful than general probabilistic oracles, although it is not known whether the lower bound is achievable in general. Hence searches for higher-order interference are not only foundationally motivated, but constitute a search for a computational resource that might have power beyond that offered by quantum computation. (shrink)

This paper presents a theory of algorithms designed to optimize highly interactive systems (multi-diminsional, multi-peak, nonlinear functions). Two applications are discussed: one concerns cognitive systems capable of learning and generalization, and one concerns calculations dealing with the "origin of life" from "organic soups". The algorithms are intrinsically parallel--each function argument processed serves as a carrier for information about a tremendous number of regions (hyperplanes) in the function's domain. Each region is automatically ranked according to the estimated average value of the (...) function over that region, and the rankings are compactly stored in the algorithm's data base (M l-tuples store approximately M-2 l/2 rankings). Thus, the algorithm implicitly processes hyperplanes by manipulating function arguments. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:PLOTINUS AND THE APEIRON OF PLATO'S PARMENIDES JOHN H. HEISER Niagara Unwersity Niagara University, New York WE USE THE TERM "infinite" so freely to designate what supposedly transcends something called ' the finite " that one might imagine the concept to be entirely unproblematic. Greek philosophy's difficulty even entertaining such an idea then appears as a sort of myopia, which we in our superior enlightenment have escaped. I (...) propose to examine the way in which one Greek mind, that of Hotinus, came to entertain rthe idea. There may be no better wiay to bring out the difficulties, as well as the possibilities, inherent in a concept than to observe a first class philosophical mind wrestling with it. I also hope rto show that we have a lot to learn from Plotinus. Plotinus's doctrine of the infinite has of course been examined before, on more than one occasion.1 But those who have done so, judging from what they say or do not say, appear to find nothing puzzling in the concept of " infinite perfection " or" infinite being." "We" have come to understand exactly what it means (or at least we bandy the term about 1 For instance: A. H. Armstrong, "Plotinus' Doctrine of the Infinite and its Significance for Christian Thought," Downside Review 73 (1955) : 47-58; Leo J. Sweeney, S.J., "Infinity in Plotinus," Gregorianum 38 (1957) : 515535 ; 713-732; W. Norris Clarke, S.J., "Infinity in Plotinus: a Reply,'' Gregorianum 40 (1959): 75-98; John Whittaker, "Philological Comments on the Neoplatonic Notion of Infinity,'' in The Significance of Neoplatonism, ed. R. Baine Harris (Norfolk, Va.: International Society for Neoplatonic Studies, 1976), pp. 155-172. John M. Rist devotes the third chapter, "The Plotinian One," of his Plotinus: The Road to Reality (New York: Cambridge Uninrsity Press, 1967) largely to the infinity of the One. 58 54 JOHN H. HEISER as if we did). Greek difficulties are understandable (ailthough it is hal'd not to be patronizing about them), but once we have taken note of these difficulties the only question of interest would seem to be whether Plotinus learned to discount them and to talk as we do. In my view, the only way to appreciate Plotinus's aichievement, and to learn from him, is to take these difficulties with great seriousness and to stmggle through them with Plotinus. Another point most commentators overlook is something I take to be both a frucit and a clue to much of what Plotinus says about the Infinite Source of the universe. This is that, in explaining why the One should be called " infinite," Plotinu!! is presenting his e:xiegesis of a perplexing passage in Plato's Parmenides.2 Rather than following his own 1ine of thought to the conc1usion that the One must be infinite, we see Plotinus casting about for some meaning he can assign to a term he is confronted with. I happen to think that his exegesis of Plato is mistaken. This raises the interesting possibility that Plotinus 's breakthrough, if it is a breakthrough and not an aberration, resulted by accident from a mis.take. Before examining Greek views on the infinite, I should like to play Socrates for a moment and examine the concept itself of " infinite perfection." A bit of dialectic might help dispel some of the complacency that surrounds it. As it stands, "infinitely perfect" is at least verbally self-contradictory, as if one were to say " endlessly finished." This may explain why even Plotinus never put it quite thaJt way. But even if we can get around that, what could it mean for something to be 2 :M:ost commentators simply ignore the point, but Professor Armstrong, who is usually so alert to sources, makes the surprising statement that "there is no clear evidence that Plato ever thought or spoke of the One or Good as in any sense apeiron" ("Doctrine of the Infinite," p. 48). Professor Rist goes further and claims that "the 'beyond Being' of Plato must mean a finite Being in some way beyond other finite beings" (Road to Reality, p. 24). But Rist appears to assume he and his readers share a common understanding of what it... (shrink)

As members of the Working Group on Genetic Testing in Disability Insurance, the authors of this alternative opinion describe their areas of disagreement with some of the conclusions in the paper written by Susan M. Wolf and Jeffrey P. Kahn.

Transcranial magnetic stimulation, EEG, and behavioral studies by our group implicate spurious activation of speech perception neurocircuitry in the genesis of auditory hallucinations in schizophrenia. The neurobiological basis of these abnormalities remains uncertain, however. We review our ongoing studies, which suggest that altered cortical coupling underlies speech processing in schizophrenia and is expressed via disrupted gamma resonances and impaired corollary discharge function of self-generated verbal thought.