In this article we analyze the claim that a probabilistic interpretation of the infinite epistemic regress problem leads to a unique solution, the so called “completion” of the regress. This claim is implicitly based on the assumption that the standard Kolmogorov axioms of probability theory are suitable for describing epistemic probability. This assumption, however, has been challenged in the literature, by various authors. One of the alternatives that have been suggested to replace the Kolmogorov axioms in case of an epistemic (...) interpretation of probability, are belief functions, introduced by Shafer in 1976. We show that when one uses belief functions to describe the infinite epistemic regress problem, it is no longer the case that the solution is unique. We also argue that this complies with common sense. (shrink)

In a recent paper Ronald Meester and Timber Kerkvliet argue by example that infinite epistemic regresses have different solutions depending on whether they are analyzed with probability functions or with belief functions. Meester and Kerkvliet give two examples, each of which aims to show that an analysis based on belief functions yields a different numerical outcome for the agent’s degree of rational belief than one based on probability functions. In the present paper we however show that the (...) outcomes are the same. The only way in which probability functions and belief functions can yield different solutions for the agent’s degree of belief is if they are applied to different examples, i.e. to different situations in which the agent finds himself. (shrink)

Buddhism is all about training the mind, and boot camp is an ideal training method for this generation's short attention span. The chapters in this small book can be read in any order, and are simple and easy to understand. Each story, inspirational quote, and teaching offers mindfulness-enhancing techniques that anyone can relate to. You don't need to be a Buddhist to find the Buddha's teachings motivational. As the Dalai Lama says, "Don't try to use what you learn from Buddhism (...) to be a Buddhist; use it to be a better whatever-you-already-are." So whether it's Mother Teresa's acts of charity, Gandhi's perseverance, or your aunt Betty's calm demeanor, as long as you're motivated to be better today than you were yesterday, it doesn't matter who inspires you. Regardless of religion, geographical region, race, ethnicity, color, gender, sexual orientation, age, ability, flexibility, or vulnerability, if you do good you feel good, and if you do bad you feel bad. Buddhism isn't just about meditating. It's about rolling up your sleeves to relieve some of the suffering in the world. If you are ready to be a soldier of peace in the army of love, welcome to Buddhist Boot Camp! (shrink)

"Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made."--Immanuel Kant Isaiah Berlin was one of the most important philosophers of the twentieth century--an activist of the intellect who marshaled vast erudition and eloquence in defense of the endangered values of individual liberty and moral and political pluralism. In the Crooked Timber of Humanity he exposes the links between the ideas of the past and the social and political cataclysms of our present century: between the (...) Platonic belief in absolute Truth and the lure of authoritarianism between the eighteenth-century reactionary ideologue Joseph de Maistre and twentieth-century fascism between the romanticism of Schiller and Byron and the militant--and sometimes genocidal--nationalism that convulses the modern world. (shrink)

"Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made."--Immanuel Kant Isaiah Berlin was one of the most important philosophers of the twentieth century--an activist of the intellect who marshaled vast erudition and eloquence in defense of the endangered values of individual liberty and moral and political plurality. In The Crooked Timber of Humanity he exposes the links between the ideas of the past and the social and political cataclysms of our own time: between the (...) Platonic belief in absolute truth and the lure of authoritarianism; between the eighteenth-century reactionary ideologue Joseph de Maistre and twentieth-century Fascism; between the romanticism of Schiller and Byron and the militant--and sometimes genocidal--nationalism that convulses the modern world. This new edition features a revised text that supplants all previous versions, a new foreword in which award-winning novelist John Banville discusses Berlin's life and ideas, particularly his defense of pluralism, and a substantial new appendix that provides rich context, including letters by Berlin and previously uncollected writings, most notably his virtuoso review of Bertrand Russell's A History of Western Philosophy. (shrink)

In this paper, we analyze the behavior of Dutch tropical timber investment funds in relation to financial regulation. These funds are a niche market within the market for socially responsible investments. During the past few years, several Dutch timber funds went bankrupt, whereas others were surrounded by scandals. Partly as a reaction to this, tighter regulation was developed and implemented. In response to the regulatory changes timber funds adjusted their operations and business strategy. The lack of supervision (...) of timber funds, the subsequent tightening of the regulation and the strategic responses of the timber funds fits into the ‘regulatory dialectic’ as described by Edward Kane. Moreover, we can use Akerlof’s concept of informational asymmetries to explain the underlying cause of the regulatory dialectic. The key problem with the Dutch timber funds is that there is no financial supervision with respect to the liquidity and the solvency of the timber funds. Consequently, investors are unable to verify the claims made by the timber funds, which causes major information asymmetries between the two parties. Our case study demonstrates how a lack of regulation can spoil a market that in itself has the potential to offer something useful to society. (shrink)

Why is it commonplace for us to contemplate distorted depictions of faces with eagerness and enjoyment, but to be repelled by real people whose physiognomies resemble the depicted ones? More generally, what makes perceiving pictured physically anomalous individuals so different from perceiving physically anomalous people themselves? . . . I will suggest how we can theorize human beauty, as we do beauty in art, so as to savor, rather than rebuff, novelty, disproportionateness, and even crookedness in the human shape. For (...) anomaly to present as originality rather than deviance requires a context in which we theorize the connectedness of successors with their heritage. (shrink)

Although the timber trade was essential in the tenth century to the global ambitions of the North African Fatimid Caliphate, environmental and political obstacles compelled the Fatimids to obtain most of their precious cargo from Sicily. This article discusses timber’s essential importance to the Fatimids and how they procured this commodity, shedding light on the historical developments that occurred at the ports of al-Mahdiyya and Palermo under the Fatimids as a result of continuous trade between Ifrīqiya and Sicily. (...) Applying a multidisciplinary analysis of Fatimid chancellery documents, historical texts, material culture, environmental history, and history of art, this article considers the role of the timber trade in the urban development of these two port cities. Specifically, it looks closely at the direct role of Ustādh Jūdhar, a tenth-century Fatimid official, in the procurement of timber. The result is a nuanced picture of the complexities of trade in the medieval Islamic Mediterranean world. (shrink)

In this article, the author describes the far Eastern Federal district as one of the subjects, considers the socio-economic development of the Far East, especially the timber industry. Since this industry is a priority of socio-economic development. The author also describes the problems of development of the timber industry in the Far East, focusing on the production potential, the object of attention also includes customs duties, the cost of forest products. The author considers solutions to problems through the (...) development of foreign economic cooperation with the countries of the Northeast Asia, namely through foreign investment in the timber industry, construction of common enterprises on mutually beneficial terms, etc. (shrink)

This article describes a method of automatically detecting, counting and classifying logs on a timber truck using a photograph. An image-processing algorithm is developed to process the photograph to calculate an estimate of the number of logs present and their respective diameters. The algorithm uses color information in multiple color spaces as well as geometrical operators to segment the image and extract the relevant information. This information enables the sawmill to better plan internal logistics and production in advance of (...) the truck’s arrival time. The algorithm is robust with respect to external factors such as varying lighting conditions and camera angle, but some inaccuracies remain, mainly caused by logs being occluded or covered in mud or snow. (shrink)

This essay seeks to examine the history of the intellectual comradeship between J.L. Talmon and the philosopher, political thinker, and historian of ideas, Isaiah Berlin (1909–1997). The scholarly dialog between the two began in 1947, continued until Talmon's death in 1980, and is well documented in their private correspondence. I argue that there were two levels to this dialog: First, both Berlin and Talmon took part in the Totalitarianism discourse, which was colored by Popperian terminology, and thus I claim that (...) their ideas should be examined as part of the Cold-War political discourse. The second level stemmed from their similar East-European origin, their mutual Jewish identity, and their attitude towards the Zionist movement. At times the two levels of discourse conjoined commensurably, but in other cases the juxtaposition of the two created conceptual tensions. Examining Berlin and Talmon's thought from this dual perspective, I argue, can shed new light on the inner conflicts and conceptual tensions that each of them had to face. In particular, I claim that both thinkers tried to integrate their Anglophile liberal heritage with their support of National movements in general, and the Jewish National movement in particular. Nevertheless, the different approaches of Talmon and Berlin present two concepts of liberal Nationalism: While Talmon assumed that Zionism solved the Jewish individual's dilemmas by making Jews members of a commune attached to soil; Berlin sought to preserve the individual in an inviolable sphere and thus was more ambivalent in his attitude towards the state of Israel. In conclusion, I offer to see Talmon as a classic Zionist liberal and Berlin as a supporter of what I call “Diaspora Zionism”, an approach, which would later provide the grounds for Berlin's celebrated pluralism. (shrink)

In the early 1920s, a time of significant technical change in the lumber industry, hundreds of African American workers migrated from the South to work in the mills of Siskiyou County, in northern California. White workers, who dominated working-class politics in the western timber industry, understood this as the arrival of the South in the western woods. This involved the construction of a historically particular logic of racial privilege founded on local understandings of technical and environmental change, labor organization, (...) and the broader political economic experience of the U.S. working class. The specific racism of the moment demonstrates how labor relations, occupational opportunities, and skill not only reflect racial politics but are simultaneously manipulated to produce and naturalize racial stratification. (shrink)

Most accounts of the effect of the global marketplace on deforestation in Africa, Asia, and Latin America emphasize the demand for timber used in industrial processes and the conversion of tropical forests to pastures for beef cattle. In recent years, numerous scholars and policymakers have suggested that developing a market for non-timber forest products (NTFPs) might slow the pace of habitat destruction. Although increased demand for NTFPs rarely results in massive deforestation, the depletion of the raw materials needed (...) to make particular products is common.Many rural households in the Mexican state of Oaxaca have prospered over the past three decades through the sale of brightly-painted, whimsical wood carvings (alebrijes) to international tourists and the owners of ethnic arts shops in the United States, Canada, and Europe. This paper examines a promising project aimed at providing Oaxacan alebrije-makers with a reliable, legal, and sustainable supply of wood. The ecologists, artisans, merchants, and forest owners involved in the project face formidable obstacles. Gaining permission to harvest wood from land belonging to Oaxacan communities requires the negotiation of a complex social, legal, economic, and political landscape. Artisans’ decisions about where to obtain wood rest largely on price, quality, and reliability of the supplier; they are willing to pay a premium for ecologically sustainable wood only if the additional cost can be passed on to consumers. Nonetheless, a group of carvers has begun to buy sustainably harvested wood. This arrangement has economic advantages for both the alebrije-makers and the owners of the forests where the wood is produced. (shrink)

Hylomorphism is the Aristotelian theory according to which substances are composites of matter and form. If my house is a substance, then its matter would be a collection of bricks and timbers and its form something like a structure that unites those bricks and timbers into a single substance. Contemporary hylomorphists are divided on how to understand forms best, but a prominent group of theorists argue that forms are emergent powers. According to such views, when material components are arranged appropriately, (...) a novel substance emerges with the power to impose unity on its components through time. I argue that these accounts of form fall prey to a bootstrapping problem, and so, suffer from issues of redundancy, given plausible assumptions about inherence. In their place, I suggest an ontologically minimalist conception of forms as collective manifestations of the powers of matter. (shrink)

Hylomorphism is the Aristotelian theory according to which substances are composed of matter and form. If a house is a substance, then its matter would be a collection of bricks and timbers and its form something like the structure of those bricks and timbers. It is widely agreed that matter bears a mereological relationship to substance; the bricks and timbers are parts of the house. But with form things are more controversial. Is the structure of the bricks and timbers best (...) conceived as a part of the house, or is it related to the house in some non-mereological fashion? Kathrin Koslicki argues that substances have formal parts, that forms are best conceived as bearing a mereological relation to substances. This paper shows that her argument fails, given the traditional and plausible distinction between substances and accidental unities. I close with a brief suggestion for a non-mereological construal of forms. (shrink)

When in 2001 Earth Liberation Front activists drove metal spikes into hundreds of trees in Gifford Pinchot National Forest, they were protesting the sale of a section of the old-growth forest to a timber company. But ELF's communiqu on the action went beyond the radical group's customary brief. Drawing connections between the harms facing the myriad animals who make their home in the trees and the struggles for social justice among ordinary human beings resisting exclusion and marginalization, the dispatch (...) declared, "all oppression is linked, just as we are all linked," and decried the "patriarchal nightmare" in the form of "techno-industrial global capitalism." In Total Liberation, David Naguib Pellow takes up this claim and makes sense of the often tense and violent relationships among humans, ecosystems, and nonhuman animal species, expanding our understanding of inequality and activists' uncompromising efforts to oppose it. Grounded in interviews with more than one hundred activists, on-the-spot fieldwork, and analyses of thousands of pages of documents, websites, journals, and zines, Total Liberation reveals the ways in which radical environmental and animal rights movements challenge inequity through a vision they call "total liberation." In its encounters with such infamous activists as scott crow, Tre Arrow, Lauren Regan, Rod Coronado, and Gina Lynn, the book offers a close-up, insider's view of one of the most important--and feared--social movements of our day. At the same time, it shows how and why the U.S. justice system plays to that fear, applying to these movements measures generally reserved for "jihadists"--with disturbing implications for civil liberties and constitutional freedom. How do the adherents of "total liberation" fight oppression and seek justice for humans, nonhumans, and ecosystems alike? And how is this pursuit shaped by the politics of anarchism and anticapitalism? In his answers, Pellow provides crucial in-depth insight into the origins and social significance of the earth and animal liberation movements and their increasingly common and compelling critique of inequality as a threat to life and a dream of a future characterized by social and ecological justice for all. (shrink)

Two reverse supertasks—one new and one invented by Pérez Laraudogoitia —are discussed. Contra Kerkvliet and Pérez Laraudogoitia, it is argued that these supertasks cannot be used to conduct fair infinite lotteries, i.e., lotteries on the set of natural numbers with a uniform probability distribution. The new supertask involves an infinity of gods who collectively select a natural number by each removing one ball from a collection of initially infinitely many balls in a reverse omega-sequence of actions.