While it seems to be evident that the vision of the eternal return of the same is the solution to the riddle mentioned in "On the vision and the riddle," exactly what constitutes the riddle is anything but clear. Li ke all good riddles the solution demands a paradigm shift. Nietzsche's riddle is solved by a radical rethinking of the concept of time, from a straight line to a circle. I give a detailed account of how Nietzsche's riddle is formulated (...) in such a way tha t the eternal return of the same is the only possible solution. (shrink)

Among multiple legal challenges to the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) is the premise that PPACA's “individual mandate” (requiring all individuals to obtain health insurance by 2014 or face civil penalties) is inviolate of Congress' interstate commerce powers because Congress lacks the power to regulate commercial “inactivity.” Several courts initially considering this argument have rejected it, but federal district courts in Virginia and Florida have concurred, leading to numerous appeals and prospective review of the United States Supreme Court. (...) Despite creative arguments, the dispositive constitutional question is not whether Congress' interstate commerce power extends to commercial inactivity. Rather, it is whether Congress may regulate individual decisions with significant economic ramifications in the interests of protecting and promoting the public's health. This article offers a counter-interpretation of the scope of Congress' interstate commerce power to regulate in furtherance of the public's health. (shrink)

Despite historic efforts to enact the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act in 2010, national health reform is threatened by multiple legal challenges grounded in constitutional law. Premier among these claims is the premise that PPACA’s “individual mandate” is constitutionally infirm. Attorneys General in Virginia and Florida allege that Congress’ interstate commerce powers do not authorize federal imposition of the individual mandate because Congress lacks the power to regulate commercial “inactivity.” Stated simply, Congress cannot regulate individuals who choose not to (...) obtain health insurance because they are not engaged in a commercial venture. Several courts initially considering this argument have rejected it, but two federal district courts in Virginia and Florida have concurred, leading to numerous appeals and the near promise of United States Supreme Court review. (shrink)

RésuméDans leur livre récent, George Lakoff et Rafael Núñez se livrent à une critique naturaliste soutenue du platonisme traditionnel concernant les entités mathématiques. Ils affirment que des résultats récents en sciences cognitives démontrent qu'il est faux. En particulier, ils estiment que la découverte que la cognition mathématique s'appuie pour une large part sur les métaphores conceptuelles est incompatible avec le platonisme. Nous montrons ici que tel n'est pas le cas. Nous examinons et rejetons également quelques arguments philosophiques que formulent Lakoff (...) et Núñez contre le platonisme. Enfin, nous lions leur hostilité au platonisme à certaines opinions sur les ramifications politiques de celui-ci. Pour conclure, nous faisons valoir que ces opinions sont sans fondements et présentent une image distordue des dimensions politiques du platonisme. (shrink)

Christopher Miles Coope offers a letter, drafted by Helen Taylor but certified by Mill, in which Mill asserts the duty to vote, as evidence that he could not have regarded harmfulness to others as a necessary condition of moral wrongness. But it is clear that Mill regarded the duty to vote as one of imperfect obligation, and the wrongness of not fulfilling it as a matter roughly of not doing enough, in this case not doing one's fair share. He has (...) room for the common-sense harmlessness of staying at home. At the same time he grounds political duties in the harmfulness of neglecting the power of legislation and in the possibility, consistently maintained, that one can harm by inaction. Mill's view, central to his relation between morality and liberty, remains at work here, while also suggesting reflections on the peculiarity of his conception of harm. (shrink)

Despite the lack of invariance problem (the many‐to‐many mapping between acoustics and percepts), human listeners experience phonetic constancy and typically perceive what a speaker intends. Most models of human speech recognition (HSR) have side‐stepped this problem, working with abstract, idealized inputs and deferring the challenge of working with real speech. In contrast, carefully engineered deep learning networks allow robust, real‐world automatic speech recognition (ASR). However, the complexities of deep learning architectures and training regimens make it difficult to use them to (...) provide direct insights into mechanisms that may support HSR. In this brief article, we report preliminary results from a two‐layer network that borrows one element from ASR, long short‐term memory nodes, which provide dynamic memory for a range of temporal spans. This allows the model to learn to map real speech from multiple talkers to semantic targets with high accuracy, with human‐like timecourse of lexical access and phonological competition. Internal representations emerge that resemble phonetically organized responses in human superior temporal gyrus, suggesting that the model develops a distributed phonological code despite no explicit training on phonetic or phonemic targets. The ability to work with real speech is a major advance for cognitive models of HSR. (shrink)

In her valuable book Hiding from humanity: Disgust, shame and the law, Nussbaum says that she reaches many of the same practical conclusions as Mill. But she argues that Mill’s conceptions of liberty, justice, and respect for rival ideas of the good and for religious belief, are defective, and further that they do not provide as adequate a basis for the form of political liberalism she recommends. Actually, the alleged defects in Mill rest largely on misrepresentations, but more importantly, once (...) one understands the central role of Mill’s account of justice in shaping his view of liberty and morality, it becomes clear that he offers a better response to cultural pluralism. His way of relating the morality and the aesthetics of conduct embodies a kind of respect for diversity both deeper and more realistic than that claimed for political liberalism. Mill brings a heritage from the Enlightenment in the light of which political liberalism looks like a failure of nerve. (shrink) -/- John Stuart Mill in 19th Century Philosophy Justice, Misc in Social and Political Philosophy. (shrink)

John Stuart Mill's Utilitarianism continues to serve as a rich source of moral and theoretical insight. This collection of articles by top scholars offers fresh interpretations of Mill's ideas about happiness, moral obligation, justice, and rights. Applying contemporary philosophical insights, the articles challenge the conventional readings of Mill, and, in the process, contribute to a deeper understanding of utilitarian theory as well as the complexity of moral life.

This paper reviews the literature concerning the neural correlates of the self, the relationship between self and memory and the profile of memory impairments in Alzheimer’s disease and explores the relationship between the preservation of the self and anosognosia in this condition. It concludes that a potential explanation for anosognosia in AD is a lack of updating of personal information due to the memory impairments characteristic of this disease. We put forward the hypothesis that anosognosia is due in part to (...) the “petrified self.”. (shrink)

J. S. Bell's classic 1966 review paper on the foundations of quantum mechanics led directly to the Bell nonlocality theorem. It is not widely appreciated that the review paper contained the basic ingredients needed for a nonlocality result which holds in certain situations where the Bell inequality is not violated. We present in this paper a systematic formulation and evaluation of an argument due to Stairs in 1983, which establishes a nonlocality result based on the Bell-Kochen-Specker “paradox” in quantum mechanics.

In mill the principle of utility does not ascribe rightness or wrongness to anything. It governs not just morality but the whole art of life. It says that happiness is the only thing desirable as an end. But the meaning of this formulation is problematic, Since mill's theory of practical reason conceives this desirability as an end as generating reasons for action for all agents in a way implying impartiality between self and others, Whereas in the ordinary sense it does (...) not. This interpretation is supported by detailed textual analysis. (shrink)

Continuing the investigations of X. Yu and others, we study the role of set existence axioms in classical Lebesgue measure theory. We show that pairwise disjoint countable additivity for open sets of reals is provable in RCA0. We show that several well-known measure-theoretic propositions including the Vitali Covering Theorem are equivalent to WWKL over RCA0.

‘Menander has set up a confrontation between this law [the law about epikleroi] and love… He wants the audience to regard the law as stupid and wrong… Surely one of Menander's purposes in writing this play was to make the Athenians consider seriously whether the law ought to be changed.’ Thus Professor D. M. MacDowell in the concluding paragraph of his article ‘Love versus the Law: an Essay on Menander's Aspis’. A similar view was already implicit in E. Karabelias' treatment (...) of the play as indicative of the general attitude to this law in Athens in Menander's day: ‘A n'en point douter, l'épiclérat est ressenti, á l'epoque de Ménandre, comme une anomalie intolérable pour les mceurs de la societe athénienne à la fin du ive s.av.n.è L'épiclérat est odieux et ridicule… L'hostilité envers l'épiclérat est done un signe des temps’. And Professor E. G. Turner has written: ‘it is hard to imagine that the institution of the epiclerate emerged in good standing from this derisory treatment’. (shrink)

Revisionist interpretation of Mill needs to be extended to deal with a residue of puzzles about his moral theory and its connection with his theory of liberty. The upshot shows his reinterpretation of his Benthamite tradition as a form of ‘philosophical utilitarianism’; his definition of the art of morality as collective self-defence; his ignoring of maximization in favour of ad hoc dealing in utilities; the central role of his account of the justice of punishment; the marginal role of the internal (...) sanction in his criterion of moral wrong; his deep respect for common-sense morality; and his restriction of the scope of morality so as to claim for the utilitarian tradition the whole realm of the aesthetics of conduct as part of a general theory of practical reason. (shrink)

‘Menander has set up a confrontation between this law [the law about epikleroi] and love… He wants the audience to regard the law as stupid and wrong… Surely one of Menander's purposes in writing this play was to make the Athenians consider seriously whether the law ought to be changed.’ Thus Professor D. M. MacDowell in the concluding paragraph of his article ‘Love versus the Law: an Essay on Menander's Aspis’. A similar view was already implicit in E. Karabelias' treatment (...) of the play as indicative of the general attitude to this law in Athens in Menander's day: ‘A n'en point douter, l'épiclérat est ressenti, á l'epoque de Ménandre, comme une anomalie intolérable pour les mceurs de la societe athénienne à la fin du ive s.av.n.è L'épiclérat est odieux et ridicule… L'hostilité envers l'épiclérat est done un signe des temps’. And Professor E. G. Turner has written: ‘it is hard to imagine that the institution of the epiclerate emerged in good standing from this derisory treatment’. (shrink)

George Spencer Brown, a polymath and author of Laws of Form, brought together mathematics, electronics, engineering and philosophy to form an unlikely bond. This book investigates Design with the NOR, the title of the yet unpublished 1961 typescript by Spencer Brown. The typescript formed through the author's experiences as technical engineer and developer of a new form of switching algebra for Mullard Equipment LTD., a British manufacturer of electronic components. Related essays contextualise the typescript drawing on a variety (...) of backgrounds from mathematics and engineering to philosophy and sociology. (shrink)

Working within weak subsystems of second-order arithmetic Z2 we consider two versions of the Baire Category theorem which are not equivalent over the base system RCA0. We show that one version (B.C.T.I) is provable in RCA0 while the second version (B.C.T.II) requires a stronger system. We introduce two new subsystems of Z2, which we call RCA+ 0 and WKL+ 0, and show that RCA+ 0 suffices to prove B.C.T.II. Some model theory of WKL+ 0 and its importance in view of (...) Hilbert's program is discussed, as well as applications of our results to functional analysis. (shrink)

In a comparison of the principles of special relativity and of quantum mechanics, the former theory is marked by its relative economy and apparent explanatory simplicity. A number of theorists have thus been led to search for a small number of postulates - essentially information theoretic in nature - that would play the role in quantum mechanics that the relativity principle and the light postulate jointly play in Einstein's 1905 special relativity theory. The purpose of the present paper is to (...) resist this idea, at least in so far as it is supposed to reveal the fundamental form of the theory. It is argued that the methodology of Einstein's 1905 theory represents a victory of pragmatism over explanatory depth; and that its adoption only made sense in the context of the chaotic state state of physics at the start of the 20th century - as Einstein well knew. (shrink)

The words I wish to delete in 48-9 spoil a ‘tricolon crescendo’ whose three members are clearly marked and whose verbs are perhaps deliberately varied in person and tense . The parataxis by means of hic is awkward, and the words seem to be a versified gloss. The Scholiast says : id est: to nobilis tantum et imperitus. nam de plebe, id est de humili familia, eloquentes exeunt, qui nobilium imperitorum causas defendunt; but that could be a paraphrase based on (...) the text as it stands in our manuscripts. (shrink)

In this study, we comprehensively examine the relationships between ethical leadership, social exchange, and employee commitment. We find that organizational and supervisory ethical leadership are positively related to employee commitment to the organization and supervisor, respectively. We also find that different types of social exchange relationships mediate these relationships. Our results suggest that the application of a multifoci social exchange perspective to the context of ethical leadership is indeed useful: As hypothesized, within-foci effects (e.g., the relationship between organizational ethical leadership (...) and commitment to the organization) are stronger than cross-foci effects (e.g., the relationship between supervisory ethical leadership and commitment to the organization). In addition, in contrast to the “trickle down” model of ethical leadership (Mayer et al. in Org Behav Hum Decis Process 108:1–13, 2009), our results suggest that organizational ethical leadership is both directly and indirectly related to employee outcomes. (shrink)