The main purpose of this paper is to bring out some significant humanistic characteristics of Chinese religious thought. My account is limited to what is originally and typically Chinese. That is to say, it will exclude what has been influenced by Buddhism from India or Christianity from the Western world. Some of the theses of this paper are based on scholarly works, while others are drawn from the author's primary experience.

The author of Governance in a Globalizing World probes the limits of American power, offering a compelling argument for the world's lone superpower to forge cooperative relationships with nations around the world.

Solves Vann McGee's counterexample to Modus Ponens within classical logic by disclosing the suppressed premises and bringing them /within/ the argument.

What must the United States do to remain the global superpower and stop alienating the rest of the world? The author of the bestselling "The Paradox of American Power" has one clear answer: soft power.

Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason ranks with Being and Nothingness as a work of major philosophical significance, but it has been largely neglected. The first volume, published in 1960, was dismissed as a Marxist work at a time when structuralism was coming into vogue; the incomplete second volume has only recently been published in France. In this commentary on the first volume, Joseph S. Catalano restores the Critique to its deserved place among Sartre’s works and within philosophical discourse as (...) a whole. Sartre attempts one of the most needed tasks of our times, Catalano asserts—the delivery of history into the hands of the average person. Sartre’s concern in the Critique is with the historical significance of everyday life. Can we, he asks, as individuals or even collectively, direct the course of our history? A historical context for our lives is given to us at birth, but we sustain that context with even our most mundane actions—buying a newspaper, waiting in line, eating a meal. In looking at history, Sartre argues, reason can never separate the historical situation of the investigator from the investigation. Thus reason falls into a dialectic, always depending upon the past for guidance but always being reshaped by the present. Clearly showing the influence of Marx on Sartre’s thought, the Critique adds the historical dimension lacking in Being and Nothingness. In placing the Critique within the corpus of Sartre’s philosophical writings, Catalano argues that it represents a development rather than a break from Sartre’s existentialist phase. Catalano has organized his commentary to follow the Critique and has supplied clear examples and concrete expositions of the most difficult ideas. He explicates the dialogue between Marx and Sartre that is internal to the text, and he also discusses Sartre’s Search for Method, which is published separately from the Critique in English editions. (shrink)

Yoga has come to be an icon of Indian culture and civilization, and it is widely regarded as being timeless and unchanging. Based on extensive ethnographic research and an analysis of both ancient and modern texts, Yoga in Modern India challenges this popular view by examining the history of yoga, focusing on its emergence in modern India and its dramatically changing form and significance in the twentieth century. Joseph Alter argues that yoga's transformation into a popular activity idolized for (...) its health value is based on modern ideas about science and medicine. Alter centers his analysis on an interpretation of the seminal work of Swami Kuvalayananda, one of the chief architects of the Yoga Renaissance in the early twentieth century. From this point of orientation he explores current interpretations of yoga and considers how practitioners of yogic medicine and fitness combine the ideas of biology, physiology, and anatomy with those of metaphysics, transcendence, and magical power. The first serious ethnographic history of modern yoga in India, this fluently written book is must reading not only for students and scholars but also practitioners who seek a deeper understanding of how yoga developed over time into the exceedingly popular phenomenon it is today. (shrink)

"[A Commentary on Jean-Paul Sartre's Being and Nothingness] represents, I believe, a very important beginning of a deservingly serious effort to make the whole ...

It is time for a new paper about open questions in the currently very active area of randomness and computability. Ambos-Spies and Kučera presented such a paper in 1999 [1]. All the question in it have been solved, except for one: is KL-randomness different from Martin-Löf randomness? This question is discussed in Section 6.Not all the questions are necessarily hard—some simply have not been tried seriously. When we think a question is a major one, and therefore likely to be hard, (...) we indicate this by the symbol ▶, the criterion being that it is of considerable interest and has been tried by a number of researchers. Some questions are close contenders here; these are marked by ▷. With few exceptions, the questions are precise. They mostly have a yes/no answer. However, there are often more general questions of an intuitive or even philosophical nature behind. We give an outline, indicating the more general questions.All sets will be sets of natural numbers, unless otherwise stated. These sets are identified with infinite strings over {0, 1}. Other terms used in the literature are sequence and real. (shrink)

In two recent papers Perez Laraudogoitia has described a variety of supertasks involving elastic collisions in Newtonian systems containing a denumerably infinite set of particles. He maintains that these various supertasks give examples of systems in which energy is not conserved, particles at rest begin to move spontaneously, particles disappear from a system, and particles are created ex nihilo. An analysis of these supertasks suggests that they involve systems that do not satisfy the mathematical conditions required of Newtonian systems at (...) the time the supertask is due to be completed, or else they rely on the application of the time-reversal transformation to states which are not well-defined. Consequently, it is unjustified to conclude that the paradoxical results are arising from within the framework of Newtonian mechanics. In the last part of this article, we discuss various aspects of the physics of these supertasks. (shrink)

Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason ranks with Being and Nothingness as a work of major philosophical significance, but it has been largely neglected. The first volume, published in 1960, was dismissed as a Marxist work at a time when structuralism was coming into vogue; the incomplete second volume has only recently been published in France. In this commentary on the first volume, Joseph S. Catalano restores the Critique to its deserved place among Sartre’s works and within philosophical discourse as (...) a whole. Sartre attempts one of the most needed tasks of our times, Catalano asserts—the delivery of history into the hands of the average person. Sartre’s concern in the Critique is with the historical significance of everyday life. Can we, he asks, as individuals or even collectively, direct the course of our history? A historical context for our lives is given to us at birth, but we sustain that context with even our most mundane actions—buying a newspaper, waiting in line, eating a meal. In looking at history, Sartre argues, reason can never separate the historical situation of the investigator from the investigation. Thus reason falls into a dialectic, always depending upon the past for guidance but always being reshaped by the present. Clearly showing the influence of Marx on Sartre’s thought, the Critique adds the historical dimension lacking in Being and Nothingness. In placing the Critique within the corpus of Sartre’s philosophical writings, Catalano argues that it represents a development rather than a break from Sartre’s existentialist phase. Catalano has organized his commentary to follow the Critique and has supplied clear examples and concrete expositions of the most difficult ideas. He explicates the dialogue between Marx and Sartre that is internal to the text, and he also discusses Sartre’s Search for Method, which is published separately from the Critique in English editions. (shrink)

This introductory article begins by presenting the author's impression of contemporary Western philosophy as having become too professionalized to perform the functions of moral guidance and spiritual supervision. Herein lies a reason for the search for Oriental wisdom by some people in the West. The author then points out some fallacies often incurred in the pursuit of Chinese philosophy: the fallacy of ?craving for cash value?, the fallacy of ?the Procrustean bed?, and the fallacy of ?the misplaced hamburger?. In the (...) second half of the paper the author attempts a characterization of Chinese philosophy as a whole. As he interprets it, Chinese philosophy as a distinct tradition possesses five characteristics: (1) human centrality, (2) unity of theory and practice, (3) pedagogic universality, (4) methodological simplicity, and (5) dynamic harmony. (shrink)

In this volume, Joseph Catalano offers an in-depth exploration of Jean-Paul Sartre's four major philosophical writings: Being and Nothingness, Saint Genet: Actor and Martyr, The Critique of Dialectical Reason, and The Family Idiot. These works have been immensely influential, but they are long and difficult and thus challenging for both students and scholars. Catalano here demonstrates the interrelation of these four works, their internal logic, and how they provide insights into important but overlooked aspects of Sartre's thought, such as (...) the body, childhood, and evil. The book begins with Sartre's final work, The Family Idiot, and systematically works backward to Being and Nothingness. Catalano then repeats the study by advancing chronologically, beginning with Being and Nothingness and ending with The Family Idiot and an afterword on Flaubert's Madame Bovary. Readers will appreciate Catalano's subtle readings as well as the new insights that he brings to Sartre's oeuvre. (shrink)

A version of nonstandard analysis, Internal Set Theory, has been used to provide a resolution of Zeno's paradoxes of motion. This resolution is inadequate because the application of Internal Set Theory to the paradoxes requires a model of the world that is not in accordance with either experience or intuition. A model of standard mathematics in which the ordinary real numbers are defined in terms of rational intervals does provide a formalism for understanding the paradoxes. This model suggests that in (...) discussing motion, only intervals, rather than instants, of time are meaningful. The approach presented here reconciles resolutions of the paradoxes based on considering a finite number of acts with those based on analysis of the full infinite set Zeno seems to require. The paper concludes with a brief discussion of the classical and quantum mechanics of performing an infinite number of acts in a finite time. (shrink)

In dynamic epistemic logic and other fields, it is natural to consider relativization as an operator taking sentences to sentences. When using the ideas and methods of dynamic logic, one would like to iterate operators. This leads to iterated relativization. We are also concerned with the transitive closure operation, due to its connection to common knowledge. We show that for three fragments of the logic of iterated relativization and transitive closure, the satisfiability problems are fi1 11–complete. Two of these fragments (...) do not include transitive closure. We also show that the question of whether a sentence in these fragments has a finite (tree) model is fi0 01–complete. These results go via reduction to problems concerning domino systems. (shrink)

As the journal is effectively defunct, I am uploading a full-text copy, but only of my abstract and article, and some journal front matter. -/- Note that the pagination in the PDF version differs from the official pagination because A4 and 8.5" x 11" differ. -/- Traditionally, imperatives have been handled with deontic logics, not the logic of propositions which bear truth values. Yet, an imperative is issued by the speaker to cause (stay) actions which change the state of affairs, (...) which is, in turn, described by propositions that bear truth values. Thus, ultimately, imperatives affect truth values. In this paper, we put forward an idea that allows us to reason with imperatives using classical logic by constructing a one-to-one correspondence between imperatives and a particular class of declaratives. (shrink)

We show that the Turing degrees are not sufficient to measure the complexity of continuous functions on [0, 1]. Computability of continuous real functions is a standard notion from computable analysis. However, no satisfactory theory of degrees of continuous functions exists. We introduce the continuous degrees and prove that they are a proper extension of the Turing degrees and a proper substructure of the enumeration degrees. Call continuous degrees which are not Turing degrees non-total. Several fundamental results are proved: a (...) continuous function with non-total degree has no least degree representation, settling a question asked by Pour-El and Lempp; every non-computable f $\epsilon \mathcal{C}[0, 1]$ computes a non-computable subset of $\mathbb{N}$ ; there is a non-total degree between Turing degrees $a _\eqslantless_{\tau}$ b iff b is a PA degree relative to a; $\mathcal{S} \subseteq 2^{\mathbb{N}}$ is a Scott set iff it is the collection of f-computable subsets of $\mathbb{N}$ for some f $\epsilon \mathcal{C}[O, 1]$ of non-total degree; and there are computably incomparable f, g $\epsilon \mathcal{C}[0, 1]$ which compute exactly the same subsets of $\mathbb{N}$ . Proofs draw from classical analysis and constructive analysis as well as from computability theory. (shrink)

This paper draws its title from the recent symposium of which it was part; it attempts to respond to the question raised by that title, taking current work in set theory into account. To this end the paper contrasts set theory with number theory, examines a severe brand of set-theoretic realism that is suggested by a passage from Godel, and sketches a first-order way of looking at the results about competing extensions of Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory. A formalistic sentiment may be (...) detectable in some portions of the paper. (shrink)

Peirce writes "It is an indubitable result of the theory of probabilities that every gambler, if he continues long enough, must ultimately be ruined... if he plays long enough he will be sure some time to have such a run against him as to exhaust his entire fortune.... The same thing is true of an insurance company. Let the directors take the utmost pains... according to the doctrine of chances, the time must come, at last, when their losses will bring (...) them to a stop." This note shows that under the most plausible interpretation of the quoted passage Peirce is committed to a mathematical untruth. (shrink)

We call A weakly low for K if there is a c such that $K^A(\sigma)\geq K(\sigma)-c$ for infinitely many σ; in other words, there are infinitely many strings that A does not help compress. We prove that A is weakly low for K if and only if Chaitin's Ω is A-random. This has consequences in the K-degrees and the low for K (i.e., low for random) degrees. Furthermore, we prove that the initial segment prefix-free complexity of 2-random reals is infinitely (...) often maximal. This had previously been proved for plain Kolmogorov complexity. (shrink)

Genetic discrimination is becoming an increasingly important problem in the United States. Information acquired from genetic tests has been used by insurance companies to reject applications for insurance policies and to refuse payment for the treatment of illnesses. Numerous states and the United States Congress have passed or are considering passage of laws that would forbid such use of genetic information by health insurance companies. Here we argue that much of this legislation is severely flawed because of the difficulty in (...) distinguishing genetic from nongenetic tests. In addition, barring the use by insurance companies of a genetic test but not a nongenetic test (conceivably for the same multifactorial disease) raises issues of fairness in health insurance. These arguments suggest that ultimately the problems arising from genetic discrimination cannot be solved by narrowly focused legislation but only by a modification of the entire health care system. (shrink)