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In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reply to Russell's letter of 16 May 1960 by Albert Shalom EDITORIAL NOTE To illustrate a list ofrecent acquisitions in Russell (Summer 1981), we printed in facsimile Russell's letter of 16 May 1960 to Professor Albert Shalom concerning the interpretation of Wittgenstein's Tractatus LogicoPhilosophicus. The correspondence between Russell and Shalom began when Shalom wrote on I May 1960 asking whether Russell had the time and (...) inclination to read a translation of a lecture which Shalom had given the previous December in Paris. The paper was entitled "The Metaphysical Thinking Underlying Wittgenstein's Tractatus". Shalom had received "different and even contradictory appraisals" of his paper, and he very much wanted to have Russell's opinion of it. Close to the age ofninety, Russell was entering a hectic period in his life in which he worked assiduouslyfor the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. He had published three books in 1959 and had produced prefaces and introductions for other people. As usual, he was besieged with mail including numerous requests to read unsolicited manuscripts sent to him quite regularly. Yet he had managed to answer correspondence in a very personal way. In November 1959, he had been involved in a controversy regarding the refusal ofthe editor of Mind to review Ernest Gellner's Words and Things, a book which attacked the then prevalent philosophy of linguistic analysis and for which Russell had written the introduction. In the early months of1960, he took time out from his usual writing on the nuclear threat to reply to several articles devoted to his theory of descriptions and his ethical theory in the journal Philosophy. Russell's reply (4 May 1960) to Shalom's first letter states: "Thank you for your letter ofMay I. I shall be interested to see your paper on Wittgenstein's Tractatus, but, as I am very busy, it may be some time before I can read it carefully." On 8 May Shalom wrote back in appreciation enclosing his paper and an offprint of an article, "Qu'est-ce qu'un concept?", Revue internationale dephilosophie, 50 (1959): I-IS. The main objection raised against his paper, Shalom admitted, was that Wittgenstein was not concerned with problems of epistemology at the time of his writing the Tractatus. Nonetheless, Shalom felt that the "picture theory" of reality implies an epistemology, and he was unable to see a fallacy in his paper: "Perhaps the fact that I'm not a logician has something to do with the matter. Ifyou could enlighten me on this point I should be most grateful to you." 45 28th April 1982. 46 Russell winter 1982-83 Russell's letter of 16 May followed. On 25 May Shalom challenged Russell's interpretation. Far /rom underestimating the notion of structure, Shalom claimed that he had emphasized the notion as the key to understanding the Tractatus. "In fact, my main point is that Wittgenstein's analyses of various concepts are unintelligible unless understood as arguments in terms of the dominating idea ofstructure or form. And that is what I understand as a metaphysical argument." Shalom went on to say that his interest in any philosopher was to try to discover the chief concepts employed in the philosopher's analysis and to examine the manner in which the analysis was performed. For this reason, the later Wittgenstein was not devoid ofinterest. In a postscript, he asked Russell whether he would be in London in July ofthat year, and ifso, whether a meeting was possible. Russell replied on 18June as follows: "Thank you for your letter ofMay 25. I am sorry that at present my time and thought are so occupied with matters very remote from those with whichyour letter deals that I cannot offeryou a reasoned reply. Unfortunately, I do not expect to be in London in July so that I am afraid a meeting will hardly be possible." On 14 Shalom requested the return of his paper, and Russell complied on 19 July. Shalom is now Professor ofPhilosophy at McMaster. We invited him to comment on his exchange with Russell, particularly Russell's letter of16 May 1960. His comments take the form ofa further (and no doubtfinal) letter in the exchange.-Carl... (shrink)

The following statement is a report of the Committee on Philosophy in Education of the American Philosophical Association and was approved by the Association's Board of Officers in September, 1959. The Committee was composed of the following: C. W. Hendel, Chairman, H. G. Alexander, R. M. Chisholm, Max Fisch, Lucius Garvin, Douglas Morgan, A. E. Murphy, Charner Perry, and R. G. Turnbull. Primary responsibility for the preparation of this report belonged to a subcommittee composed of Roderick M. Chisholm, Chairman, (...) H. G. Alexander, Lewis Hahn, Paul C. Hayner, and Charles W. Hendel. (shrink)

Assume this hypothetical situation: an American pharmaceutical company, Maxwell Fisch Pharmaceuticals, Inc., wishes to perform clinical trials involving a new antipsychotic medication, Klezac. Klezac is in its third phase of the clinical stage of the drug research process. Once the testing is complete, Maxwell plans to submit a New Drug Application, the official request to begin marketing Klezac, to the Food and Drug Administration. The new drug is expected to receive FDA approval in 2 or more years. The company (...) decides to shift its research and development activities to Z, a small, developing country. In doing so, Maxwell is following the course taken by numerous other drug companies who wish to take advantage of faster governmental approval in foreign sites and ensuing cheaper research costs. (shrink)

Public streets are central to the built environment, where individuals seek a fair share of the roadway’s benefits and harms. But the American street, an asphalt landscape typically defined and designed for cars, can be inaccessible, unhealthy, and dangerous for the non-motorized, whose transportation choices have the smallest ecological footprint. Concern for social equity and sustainability requires rethinking the street geographically and ethically, and asking: “In what sense is the street a space of justice? How do traditional street regulation and (...) design manifest ethical priorities? And what might a more just street look like, in theory and practice?” Such questions prompt one to engage both the spatial and moral, thus drawing from critical geography and ethics to analyze roadways in terms of fairness and relational wholeness, and argue for what might be called a shalom street. Engaging such ethical concepts with the technical vocabularies of street regulation and design requires analyzing how national model standards and their interpretation enforce and materialize justice on the street.The promise of more just alternatives such as more sustainable and fair “Complete Streets” to live in needs to be explored. (shrink)

Menachem Fisch is the Joseph and Ceil Mazer Professor of History and Philosophy of Science and Director of the Center for Religious and Interreligious Studies at Tel Aviv University. He is also Senior Fellow of the Kogod Center for the Renewal of Jewish Thought at the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem.

Studies in Abraham Joshua Heschel's Oeuvre.

This book explores what motivates net-generation community college students to complete their degrees. By emphasizing relationships, personal growth, and support systems, the author’s research will empower educational institutions to increase retention and foster success.

Was Maimonides a radical philosopher who subtly argued for a naturalist world and who saw the obligation to keep the Torah's commandments as a social and moral obligation - or was he a conservative Jewish believer who only tried to formulate philosophical arguments in favour of a revealed religion? This question has been central to the interpretation of Maimonides from the 12th century until modern times. In the four chapters of this book, Shalom Sadik argues for a radical philosophical (...) interpretation of Maimonides. (shrink)

The transformers that drive chatbots and other AI systems constitute large language models (LLMs). These are currently the focus of a lively discussion in both the scientific literature and the popular media. This discussion ranges from hyperbolic claims that attribute general intelligence and sentience to LLMs, to the skeptical view that these devices are no more than “stochastic parrots”. I present an overview of some of the weak arguments that have been presented against LLMs, and I consider several of the (...) more compelling criticisms of these devices. The former significantly underestimate the capacity of transformers to achieve subtle inductive inferences required for high levels of performance on complex, cognitively significant tasks. In some instances, these arguments misconstrue the nature of deep learning. The latter criticisms identify significant limitations in the way in which transformers learn and represent patterns in data. They also point out important differences between the procedures through which deep neural networks and humans acquire knowledge of natural language. It is necessary to look carefully at both sets of arguments in order to achieve a balanced assessment of the potential and the limitations of LLMs. (shrink)

Learning theory has frequently been applied to language acquisition, but discussion has largely focused on information theoretic problems—in particular on the absence of direct negative evidence. Such arguments typically neglect the probabilistic nature of cognition and learning in general. We argue first that these arguments, and analyses based on them, suffer from a major flaw: they systematically conflate the hypothesis class and the learnable concept class. As a result, they do not allow one to draw significant conclusions about the learner. (...) Second, we claim that the real problem for language learning is the computational complexity of constructing a hypothesis from input data. Studying this problem allows for a more direct approach to the object of study—the language acquisition device—rather than the learnable class of languages, which is epiphenomenal and possibly hard to characterize. The learnability results informed by complexity studies are much more insightful. They strongly suggest that target grammars need to be objective, in the sense that the primitive elements of these grammars are based on objectively definable properties of the language itself. These considerations support the view that language acquisition proceeds primarily through data-driven learning of some form. (shrink)

1. Formal semantics in linguistics -- 2. Generalized quantifier theory -- 3. The interface between syntax and semantics -- 4. Anaphora, discourse, and modality -- 5. Focus, presupposition, and negation -- 6. Tense -- 7. Questions -- 8. Plurals -- 9. Computational semantics -- 10. Lexical semantics -- 11. Semantics and related domains.

The human self model suggests that the construct of self involves functions such as agency, body-centered spatial perspectivity, and long-term unity. Vogeley, Kurthen, Falkai, and Maieret (1999) suggest that agency is subserved by the prefrontal cortex and other association areas of the cortex, spatial perspectivity by the prefrontal cortex and the parietal lobes, and long-term unity by the prefrontal cortex and the temporal lobes and that all of these functions are impaired in schizophrenia. Exploring the connections between the prefrontal cortex (...) and the construct of self, the present article extends the application of the self model to autism. It suggests that in contrast to schizophrenia, agency and spatial perspectivity are probably preserved in autism, but that, similarly to schizophrenia, long-term unity is probably impaired. This hypothesis is compatible with a model of neuropsychological dysfunction in autism in a neural network including parts of the prefrontal cortex, the temporal lobes, and the cerebellum. (shrink)