In a recent article, Shaw contrasts his own supposed good behaviour, as that of a self-proclaimed “social distance warrior” with the alleged rude behaviour of one of his relatives, Jack, at social events in the former’s house in Scotland in the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic. He does so to illustrate and support his claims that it was wrong and rude to fail to comply with the governmental advice regarding social distancing because we had a responsibility “to minimize risk” (...) and not wrong nor rude to challenge and cajole those people who failed to do so. This article shows that his claims are contestable. It suggests that his own behaviour was no better than Jack’s. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Book Reviews Bibliography on Plato's "'Laws, "" 1920-1970: With Additional Citations through May, 1975. By Trevor J. Saunders. (New York: Arno Press, 1976. Pp. i + 60. $15.00) The Penguin Classics translator of the non-Socratic Laws, as Leo Strauss called them, has here compiled in a most usable way a thorough bibliography of books and articles about the Laws or parts of them. The section "Texts, Translations, and Commentaries" (...) properly excludes translations not made directly from the Greek. In previous centuries this would, also properly, have excluded many a famous or popular translation, such as Thomas Taylor's or Victor Cousin's, worked out from the text of M. Ficino's "first edition" in Latin. Given the state of the Greek text and the practice, inaugurated by Ficino, of improving upon the Greek in the translatioias, some notation about the literalness of the translations cited would have been of additional value. Section B, in thirty pages, is the largest and also deliberately the most selective in striving to limit itself to work concerned exclusively or primarily with the Laws. But it cannot avoid including much material about some aspect of Plato in general rather than about the Laws; this is especially true of the subsection, B1, on comprehensive accounts. Section B2, on the text and its tradition, has overwhelmingly more citations about the indirect tradition than about the texts themselves, an interesting indication of the current state of this question. The next subsections, to B12, divide according to subject matter. BI3 lists studies on the influence of the Laws. The last section, in twenty-four pages, is most valuable. It lists, by Stephanus page number, an abundance of discussions of individual passages from Book I through Book XII wherever these discussions, bibliographically speaking, may have occurred. Students of the Laws will be well served by, and most grateful to, Professor Saunders for this bibliography. I can only second the intent of his parting epigraph that sends us back to the study of the Laws themselves. But I must add that more explicitly detailed work appears to be required both on the difficulties the text itself presents to students of Plato (one thinks of A. Boeckh's analyses of the prose in Books I through III) and on those which arise when the Laws is contrasted--from the point of view of design and intellectuality--with those of Plato's works that are comparable, if not in number of pages, at least in scale of conception and monumentality. V. TEJERA SUNY at Stony Brook Science and Philosophy in Aristotle's Biological Works. By Anthony Preus. (Hildesheim and New York: George Olms, 1975. Pp. ix + 404. DM.88) A reciprocal influence between Aristotle's philosophy and biology--if it could be demonstrated through step-by-step criticism and not merely asserted in generalities about functionalism--might help to explain both, and might also itself be philosophically interesting ; for it should clarify Aristotle's concepts of form, essence, universal, and species-concepts which have been mercilessly jumbled in the traditional interpretations. With the failure of Jaegerian developmental analyses, we can hardly now hope for help from detailed chronology. But a general dating of Aristotle's biological interest to the Assos-Mytilene period, when he was already aged forty, is accepted by most people (though not by Jaeger who [463]... (shrink)

The rejection of a “characterless” moral self is central to some of Bernard Williams’ most important contributions to philosophy. By the time of Truth and Truthfulness, he works instead with a model of the self constituted and stabilized out of more primitive materials through deliberation and in concert with others that takes inspiration from Diderot. Although this view of the self raises some difficult questions, it serves as a useful starting point for thinking about the process of developing an authentic (...) moral point of view in the context of contemporary living. In what follows, I begin to fill out and extend this picture of the self and its related notion of authenticity by exploring some of the “technologies of the self” at play in Rachel Cusk’s recent work (primarily, the Outline trilogy, Coventry, Second Place, and “The Stuntman”) that ask us to rethink the possibility and importance of stability; seek a way of constituting oneself and one’s values outside the confining structures of traditional narrative (focusing instead on a framework that might be provided by the visual arts); and give a different role to the sort of internalized other Williams sees as being at work in the mechanisms of shame. (shrink)

In his 1951 Gibbs Memorial Lecture, Kurt Gödel put forth his famous disjunction that either the power of the mind outstrips that of any machine or there are absolutely unsolvable problems. The view that there are no absolutely unsolvable problems is optimism, the view that there are such problems is pessimism. In his 1995—and, revised in 2013—Verificationism Then and Now, Per Martin-Löf presents an illustrative argument for a constructivist form of optimism. In response to that argument, Solomon Feferman points out (...) that Martin-Löf’s reasoning relies upon constructive understandings of key philosophical notions. In the vein of Feferman’s analysis, one might be object to Martin-Löf’s argument for either its reliance upon constructivist considerations, or for its appeal to non-unproblematically mathematical premises. We argue that both of these responses fall short. On one hand, to be critical of Martin-Löf’s reasoning for its constructiveness is to reject what would otherwise be a scientific advance on the basis of the assumption of constructivism’s falsehood or implausibility, which is of course uncharitable at best. On the other hand, to object to the argument for its use of non-unproblematically mathematical premises is to assume that there is some philosophically neutral mathematics, which is implausible. Martin-Löf’s argument relies upon his third law, the claim that from the impossibility of a proof of a proposition we can construct a proof of its negation. We close with a discussion of some ways in which this claim can be criticized from the constructive point of view. Specifically, we contend that Martin-Löf’s third law is incompatible with what has been called “Poincaré’s Principle of Epistemic Conservation”, the thesis that genuine increase in mathematical knowledge requires subject-specific insight. (shrink)

We consider a space with Generalized Uncertainty Principle which can be obtained in the frame of the deformed commutation relations. In the space with GUP we have found transformations relating coordinates and times of moving and rest frames of reference in the first order over the parameter of deformation. In the non-relativistic case we find the deformed Galilean transformation which is rotation in Euclidian space–time. This transformation is similar to the Lorentz one but written for Euclidean space–time where the speed (...) of light is replaced by some velocity related to the parameter of deformation. We show that for relativistic particle in the space with GUP the coordinates of the rest and moving frames of reference satisfy the Lorentz transformation with some effective speed of light. (shrink)

Epistemic injustice is a matter of not doing justice to the knowledge claims of a person, and it is pervasive in our everyday interactions. It can be traced to the susceptibility of the human mind to cognitive biases and distortions. The paper discusses some ways proposed to mitigate epistemic injustice and suggests that this endeavor requires efforts in more dimensions. The paper tries to demonstrate that the existing efforts to combat epistemic injustice need to be complemented by looking into the (...) very manner in which the self is automatically conceptualized. A shift from the remembering or narrative mode of understanding oneself to the experiential or episodic one will help contain misleading biases and reduce epistemic injustice. Practices such as mindfulness can help enormously in this task. (shrink)

T. 1. Opytʺ psikhologicheskoĭ istorīi i kritiki osnovnykhʺ voprosovʺ zhizni. 3. izd. 1905.--T. 2. Metafizika zhizni i khrīstianskoe otkrovenīe. 2. izd. 1906.

В книге осуществляется герменевтический поворот от литературно-эстетического прочтения - к религиозно-философскому и даже богословскому с опорой на элементы святоотеческого наследия.

The insight phenomenon is thought to comprise two components: cognitive and affective. The exact nature of the Aha! experience remains unclear; however, several explanations have been put forward. Based on the processing fluency account, the source of the Aha! experience is a sudden increase in processing fluency, associated with emerging of a solution. We hypothesized that in a situation which the Aha! experience accompanies the solution in, the problem would be judged as less difficult, regardless of the objective difficulty. We (...) also planned to confirm previously discovered associations between the Aha! experience and accuracy, confidence, and pleasure. To test the proposed hypothesis, during the preliminary stage of the study, we developed a set of 100 remote associate problems in Russian and asked 125 participants to solve problems and indicate the Aha! moment, confidence, difficulty, and likability of each problem. As expected, the Aha! experience often accompanied correct solutions and correlated with confidence judgments. We also found a positive correlation between the Aha! experience and problem likability. As for the main hypothesis, we confirmed that the Aha! experience after the presentation of the solution was associated with a decrease in subjective difficulty. When participants could not solve a problem but experienced the Aha! moment after the solution was presented to them, the problem was perceived as easier than one without the Aha! experience. We didn’t find the same effect for the Aha! after solution generation. Thus, our study partially supports the processing fluency account and demonstrates the association between the Aha! experience and metacognitive judgments about the accuracy and difficulty of problems. (shrink)

The Canadian residential sector contributes approximately 80 megatons of GHGs to the environment yearly. With the ratification of Kyoto Protocol, Canada has committed to reduce its 1990 GHG emission levels by at least 5% between 2008 and 2012. To meet this target, Canada must evaluate and exploit all feasible means to reduce fossil fuel energy consumption and GHG emissions. Test-case Canadian houses were modeled in the building-energy simulation software ESP-r. Requisite housing stock data were extracted from Canada's residential end-use energy (...) surveys. Photovoltaic and wind-turbine energy systems were assessed for their contribution to electricity generation and GHG savings. Typical household electrical consumption versus renewable electricity generation was assessed to estimate the GHG reduction, cost saving in electricity, and the impact of these technologies on single detached houses. With the use of net-metering, 100% of electricity requirements can be met by these technologies in certain cases, resulting in significant reductions in GHG emissions. (shrink)

The article characterizes post-folklore as a cultural phenomenon of the network society and defines various aspects of its functioning − sociocommunicative, cultural and psychological. The research methodology consisted of a set of basic approaches, principles and methods of scientific research. To achieve the goal, a set of general scientific and special methods was used, including the methods of logical analysis, problemchronological, generalization, synthesis, induction, and analogy.Research results. It has been proven that post-folkloric creativity is important for the development of social (...) communications, as it promotes the exchange of information between users of social networks, conveys people’s knowledge, moods, feelings, and emotions. In the cultural aspect, the works of post-folklore appear as cultural heritage of modern urbanized society and are represented by various types and genres. From the point of view of psychology, post-folklore has an impact on individual and social consciousness, on the development of cognitive processes, etc. The emergence of post-folklore in the field of education is separately mentioned, which indicates its important importance for the formation of the worldview of school youth.Conclusions. Today post-folklore is the subject of scientific research as a phenomenon of mass culture and network society, as a means of social communication, as a phenomenon that has an impact on public and individual consciousness and is gradually being established in the field of education. In the era of accelerated development of information and communication technologies, everyone has the opportunity to become a collector or author of post-folkloric creativity. Further research is planned to be carried out in the direction of studying the prospects for the development of post-folklore in Ukrainian and foreign cultures. (shrink)