© 2017. The American Astronomical Society. All rights reserved.We present new observations of the low-mass companion to HD 984 taken with the Gemini Planet Imager as a part of the GPI Exoplanet Survey campaign. Images of HD 984 B were obtained in the J and H bands. Combined with archival epochs from 2012 and 2014, we fit the first orbit to the companion to find an 18 au orbit with a 68% confidence interval between 14 and 28 au, an eccentricity (...) of 0.18 with a 68% confidence interval between 0.05 and 0.47, and an inclination of 119°with a 68% confidence interval between 114°and 125°. To address the considerable spectral covariance in both spectra, we present a method of splitting the spectra into low and high frequencies to analyze the spectral structure at different spatial frequencies with the proper spectral noise correlation. Using the split spectra, we compare them to known spectral types using field brown dwarf and low-mass star spectra and find a best-fit match of a field gravity M6.5 ±1.5 spectral type with a corresponding temperature of K. Photometry of the companion yields a luminosity of log=2.88 ± 0.07 dex with DUSTY models. Mass estimates, again from DUSTY models, find an age-dependent mass of 34 ±1 to 95 ±4 M Jup. These results are consistent with previous measurements of the object. (shrink)

A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes is a popular-science book on cosmology (the study of the origin and evolution of the universe) by British physicist Stephen Hawking. It was first published in 1988. Hawking wrote the book for readers who have no prior knowledge of the universe and people who are interested in learning.

A comprehensive reassessment of the concept of mimesis in the history of ancient Greek aesthetics and philosophy of art, with particular attention to Plato, Aristotle, Hellenistic philosophy, and neoplatonism. There is also a wide-ranging review of arguments pro and contra the idea of artistic mimesis from the Renaissance to modern literar theory. The book challenges standard accounts in numerous respects and builds a new dialectical model with which to make sense of the entire history of mimeticist thinking in aesthetics.

The authors investigated the ontological argument computationally. The premises and conclusion of the argument are represented in the syntax understood by the automated reasoning engine PROVER9. Using the logic of definite descriptions, the authors developed a valid representation of the argument that required three non-logical premises. PROVER9, however, discovered a simpler valid argument for God's existence from a single non-logical premise. Reducing the argument to one non-logical premise brings the investigation of the soundness of the argument into better focus. Also, (...) the simpler representation of the argument brings out clearly how the ontological argument constitutes an early example of a ?diagonal argument? and, moreover, one used to establish a positive conclusion rather than a paradox. (shrink)

Aboutness has been studied from any number of angles. Brentano made it the defining feature of the mental. Phenomenologists try to pin down the aboutness-features of particular mental states. Materialists sometimes claim to have grounded aboutness in natural regularities. Attempts have even been made, in library science and information theory, to operationalize the notion. But it has played no real role in philosophical semantics. This is surprising; sentences have aboutness-properties if anything does. Aboutness is the first book to examine through (...) a philosophical lens the role of subject matter in meaning. A long-standing tradition sees meaning as truth-conditions, to be specified by listing the scenarios in which a sentence is true. Nothing is said about the principle of selection--about what in a scenario gets it onto the list. Subject matter is the missing link here. A sentence is true because of how matters stand where its subject matter is concerned. Stephen Yablo maintains that this is not just a feature of subject matter, but its essence. One indicates what a sentence is about by mapping out logical space according to its changing ways of being true or false. The notion of content that results--directed content--is brought to bear on a range of philosophical topics, including ontology, verisimilitude, knowledge, loose talk, assertive content, and philosophical methodology. Written by one of today's leading philosophers, Aboutness represents a major advance in semantics and the philosophy of language. (shrink)

In Return to Reason, Stephen Toulmin argues that the potential for reason to improve our lives has been hampered by a serious imbalance in our pursuit of ...

Though Frege was interested primarily in reducing mathematics to logic, he succeeded in reducing an important part of logic to mathematics by defining relations in terms of functions. By contrast, Whitehead & Russell reduced an important part of mathematics to logic by defining functions in terms of relations (using the definite description operator). We argue that there is a reason to prefer Whitehead & Russell's reduction of functions to relations over Frege's reduction of relations to functions. There is an interesting (...) system having a logic that can be properly characterized in relational but not in functional type theory. This shows that relational type theory is more general than functional type theory. The simplification offered by Church in his functional type theory is an over-simplification: one can't assimilate predication to functional application.<br>. (shrink)

Stephen Hetherington's prominent career within epistemology has been a series of distinctive, bold, varied and provocative arguments and ideas. Bringing together Hetherington's unique body of writing for the first time, this collection features previously published as well as new material that link his approaches to key issues including knowledge, justification, fallibility, scepticism and the Gettier Problem. Advancing our understanding of the systemic nature of Hetherington's thinking, Stephen Hetherington on Epistemology presents his distinctive perspective on some of philosophy's central (...) questions about knowledge - an inviting blend of forensic detail and 'big picture' proposals. (shrink)

After criticizing some recent writings typical of the different forms of ethical objectivism, that is, intuitionism, naturalism (including the ideal observation theory and supervenience), and rationalism, I gave my reasons for siding with ethical subjectivism. I hope to demonstrate that this alternative meta‐ethical theory does not consider moral judgements meaningless nor arbitrary, and that it is compatible with empiricism in science and with serious moral commitment. Objectivists, on the other hand, tend to take a parochial view of ethics, identifying morality (...) with a particular moral point of view, nowadays liberalism and the common good, while ignoring rival moral principles which are politically important. (shrink)

The authors investigated the ontological argument computationally. The premises and conclusion of the argument are represented in the syntax understood by the automated reasoning engine PROVER9. Using the logic of definite descriptions, the authors developed a valid representation of the argument that required three non-logical premises. PROVER9, however, discovered a simpler valid argument for God's existence from a single non-logical premise. Reducing the argument to one non-logical premise brings the investigation of the soundness of the argument into better focus. Also, (...) the simpler representation of the argument brings out clearly how the ontological argument constitutes an early example of a ‘diagonal argument’ and, moreover, one used to establish a positive conclusion rather than a paradox. (shrink)

Defenders of pragmatic encroachment in epistemology (or what I call practicalism) need to address two main problems. First, the view seems to imply, absurdly, that knowledge can come and go quite easily—in particular, that it might come and go along with our variable practical interests. We can call this the stability problem. Second, there seems to be no fully satisfying way of explaining whose practical interests matter. We can call this the “whose stakes?” problem. I argue that both problems can (...) be addressed in roughly the same terms. More exactly, I argue that by first clarifying the whose stakes? problem an answer to the stability problem naturally falls out. (shrink)

Human beings have to ask how faith is possible, in this mixed world of trouble and joy. A safe universe with no scope for adversity would be a mechanical toy, not a creation. A glorious universe will be a place where troubles have eventually been overcome. Christians believe in one God, who is three Persons. God the heavenly Father took the risk of making a real world, full of living people capable of happiness. Jesus Christ, God the Son, came as (...) a human being to take responsibility for creation. He suffered and died; and he rose from death to vindicate the whole enterprise and show that creation can and will be made good. People are not left to work out their own faith but are invited to belong to the church, in order to keep in touch with God the Spirit. They are to behave as God's children, not by rule-bound conformity but by grateful response to the glory of God the Holy Trinity. (shrink)

Elizabeth Anscombe famously argued that "modern moral philosophy" centrally involved unsupported notions of obligation and culpability. Modern Moral Philosophy: From Grotius to Kant exhibits, for the first time, resources that modern moral philosophers had to respond to Anscombe's challenge, also enhancing our own philosophical grasp of morality and its foundations.

In this paper I elucidate various ways in which understanding can be seen as an excellence of the mind or intellectual virtue. Along the way, I take up the neglected issue of what it might mean to be an “understanding person”—by which I mean not a person who understands a number of things about the natural world, but a person who steers clear of things like judgmentalism in her evaluation of other people, and thus is better able to take up (...) different perspectives and view them with a sympathetic eye. Being an understanding person in this sense seems to be a character-level virtue that interestingly combines moral and epistemic elements; it also seems to be a virtue particularly needed in our age of deep political division, where it is commonly said that failures of mutual understanding are partly to blame for this problem. (shrink)

Keith Augustine’s critical evaluation of the essay contest sponsored by the Bigelow Institute of Consciousness Studies (BICS) is an interesting but problematic review. It mixes reasonable and detailed criticisms of the contest and many of the winning essays with a disappointing reliance on some of the most trite and superficial criticisms of parapsychological research. Ironically, Augustine criticizes the winning essays for using straw-man arguments and cherry-picked evidence even though many of his own arguments commit these same errors.

Formulations of Anselm’s ontological argument have been the subject of a number of recent studies. We examine these studies in light of Anselm’s text and (a) respond to criticisms that have surfaced in reaction to our earlier representations of the argument, (b) identify and defend a more refined representation of Anselm’s argument on the basis of new research, and (c) compare our representation of the argument, which analyzes that than which none greater can be conceived as a definite description, to (...) a representation that analyzes it as an arbitrary name. (shrink)

Can hybridism about moral claims be made to work? I argue it can if we accept the conventional implicature approach developed in Barker (Analysis 2000). However, this kind of hybrid expressivism is only acceptable if we can make sense of conventional implicature, the kind of meaning carried by operators like ‘even’, ‘but’, etc. Conventional implictures are a form of pragmatic presupposition, which involves an unsaid mode of delivery of content. I argue that we can make sense of conventional implicatures, but (...) doing so requires we embrace a form of pure, non-hybrid expressivism. This is a cognitivist expressivism I have developed elsewhere. We need cognitivist expressivism to make sense of how we evaluate—judge as correct or incorrect—implicature-bearing sentences. Once we embraced the possibility of this pure expressivism, we might as well be pure expressivists about normative discourse too. I show how we can do that. The motivations for a specifically hybrid theory are dialectically undercut. (shrink)

Many experimental philosophers are philosophers by training and professional affiliation, but some best work in experimental philosophy has been done by people who do not have advanced degrees in philosophy and do not teach in philosophy departments. This chapter explains that the experimental philosophy is the empirical investigation of philosophical intuitions, the factors that affect them, and the psychological and neurological mechanisms that underlie them. It explores what are philosophical intuitions, and why do experimental philosophers want to study them using (...) the methods of empirical science. The positive program in experimental philosophy shares the goal of the substantial part of traditional philosophy that is concerned with the analysis of important philosophical concepts. The negative program has implications for philosophical projects whose goal is conceptual analysis. There have been a number of responses to the challenge posed by experimental philosophy's negative program. The chapter also focuses on the expertise defense. (shrink)

In November 2022, OpenAI released ChatGPT, an incredibly sophisticated chatbot. Its capability is astonishing: as well as conversing with human interlocutors, it can answer questions about history, explain almost anything you might think to ask it, and write poetry. This level of achievement has provoked interest in questions about whether a chatbot might have something similar to human intelligence or even consciousness. Given that the function of a chatbot is to process linguistic input and produce linguistic output, we consider the (...) question whether a sophisticated chatbot might have inner speech. That is: Might it talk to itself, internally? We explored this via a conversation with ‘Playground’, a chatbot which is very similar to ChatGPT but more flexible in certain respects. We asked it questions which, plausibly, can only be answered if one first produces some inner speech. Here, we present our findings and discuss their philosophical significance. (shrink)

Why is there anything, rather than nothing at all? This question often serves as a debating tactic used by theists to attack naturalism. Many people apparently regard the question—couched in such stark, general terms—as too profound for natural science to answer. It is unanswerable by science, I argue, not because it’s profound or because science is superficial but because the question, as it stands, is ill-posed and hence has no answer in the first place. In any form in which it (...) is well-posed, it has an answer that naturalism can in principle provide. The question therefore gives the foes of naturalism none of the ammunition that many on both sides of the debate think it does. (shrink)

Tracing the history of American sociology since the Civil War, the authors of this important volume explain the field′s diversity, its lack of unifying paradigms, its broad, eclectic research agenda and its general weakness as an institutional force in either academia or the policy arena. They highlight the equivocal and often contradictory missions that sociologists prescribe for themselves and the variable nature of human, financial and intellectual resources available to the profession.

Punishment and Reparations are sometimes held to express retaliatory emotions whose object is to strike back against a victimizer. I begin by examining a version of this idea in Mill's writings about natural resentment and the sense of justice in Chapter V of Utilitarianism. Mill's view is that the ?natural? sentiment of resentment or ?vengeance? that is at the heart of the concept of justice is essentially retaliatory, therefore has ?nothing moral in it,? and so must be disciplined or moralized (...) from without by the desire to promote the general welfare. I argue to the contrary that if ?reactive attitudes? like resentment and moral blame are understood as Strawson analyzed them, as essentially ?interpersonal? or ?second personal?, they have a different content and function. They implicitly demand respect in a way that also expresses respect for the victimizer as a member of mutually accountable community of moral equals. Some implications of this idea are discussed for the ?expressive theory of punishment? and ?civil recourse? theories of torts. (shrink)

From 1876, this influential work in the history of ideas focuses on the eighteenth-century deist controversy and its effects.

A controversial life -- School life -- Family life -- Public life/private life -- Love life -- Writing life -- Pirate life -- An armed and neutral life -- A life concluded -- A life continued -- Afterword -- Overviews of the works of Søren Kierkegaard.

"Stretta è la porta e angusta è la via." I fondamentalisti di ogni sorta ispirano la propria vita a questo venerabile motto e quindi devono brandire senza sosta le proprie spade in una continua battaglia mentale contro le opinioni antitetiche degli apostati e dei rivali.

The long human odyssey of self-discovery has reached a crucial stage: everything we do affects everyone and everything else - and we know it. The next hundred years will bring more change than we can easily imagine: more opportunities for more people to achieve the fulfilment of a good life, and more risks that could result in catastrophic harm to the entire planet.Viewed geopolitically, the main question is whether the world-views of the world's most important and influential powers - China (...) and America (the one fundamentally Confucian, the other essentially individualist) - can be made to work together constructively.At the same time, on a deeper level, the even greater question is how the irreversible fact of urbanisation may nurture healthy and mature human individuality, such that the accumulated wisdom of the world's great cultures becomes mutually transforming and enriching.This bold and wide-ranging book explores those questions, with all the risks and opportunities they hold for generations still to com"--Publisher information. (shrink)

The field of modern day bioethics is relatively young and continues to constantly evolve in parallel with the ever increasingly complex nature of contemporary medical practice. These advances present clinicians with an array of therapeutic options that would have not seemed possible only a generation ago. Given these medical advances and the expansion of the academic and medicolegal field of bioethics, one would have thought that clinical decision making would have become easier. However paradoxically this has not proved to be (...) the case. Each advance may provide an answer to a particular clinical question which is almost immediately replaced by a whole new set of ethical problems that require consideration. (shrink)

Traces the rise and fall of successive international systems from medieval times to the present, showing how international order is created, how it is maintained, and why it breaks down.

A reply to Fine’s critique of Aboutness. Fine contrasts two notions of truthmaker, and more generally two notions of “state.” One is algebraic; states are sui generis entities grasped primarily through the conditions they satisfy. The other uses set theory; states are sets of worlds, or, perhaps, collections of such sets. I try to defend the second notion and question some seeming advantages of the first.

What are the characteristics to be included in a fruitful definition of democracy? More important still, which of the features commonly considered democratic had better be excluded from the dinning characteristics?

I introduce and discuss an underappreciated form of motivated cognition: motivational pessimism, which involves the biasing of beliefs for the sake of self-motivation. I illustrate how motivational pessimism avoids explanatory issues that plague other (putative) forms of motivated cognition and discuss distinctions within the category, related to awareness, aetiology, and proximal goals.

Foucault, Power, and Education invites internationally renowned scholar Stephen J. Ball to reflect on the importance and influence of Foucault on his work in educational policy.

This book examines the psychological responses of people to the excitements and terrors that characterise the modern world. Beginning with a description of modernist and post-modernist accounts of contemporary life, it then moves into detailed discussions of narcissism and psychosis - two states of mind that seem to characterise the 'crises of self' to which the modern world gives rise. With an interweaving of social theory and psychodynamic explanations, this is a sophisticated and compelling text. Identity Crisis will be of (...) interest to students in a wide range of disciplines including psychology, sociology, psychoanalysis, politics and cultural studies. (shrink)