A 4-space formulation of Dirac's equation gives results formally identical to those of the usual Klein paradox. However, some extra physical detail can be inferred, and this suggests that the most extreme case involves pair production within the potential barrier.

Or a Treatise on Language. ... oironff inclination for na : this is one of the most s s language exposes'*! ... cs- •al, enables me to gratify my unenviable propensity. , Among the results is a Treatise on the Philosophy of / Human Knowledge.

Antonio Argandoña, Norbert Bilbeny, Victòria Camps, Miquel Calsina, Àngel Castiñeira, Cristian Palazzi, Ferran Requejo, Raimon Ribera, Begoña Román, Ferran Sàez, Miquel Seguró, Francesc Torralba, Josep Maria Vallès, Rosamund Thomas Ramon Llull Journal of Applied Ethics 2012 3(3):9-16.

This essay aims to critically assess the later Foucault's ethical turn by using Levinas's ethical metaphysics as critical yardstick. Foucault's notion of ethical subjectivity constitutes a site of resistance against externally imposed subjugating subject identities. Apart from a practice of freedom, Foucault also insists that it engenders the subject with a generous responsiveness towards others. Despite Foucault's other-aspirations, it seems probable that care of the self would fall short ethically when compared to Levinas's insistence upon an unconditional openness towards the (...) Other. Upon closer investigation, however, we find that Levinas's ethical metaphysics is founded upon phenomenological analyses of our immanent 'economic' existence here and now in the world. Although he maintains that metaphysics or 'transcendence, the welcoming of the other by the same' (Levinas, 1979:43/13) is primary, the immanent process of the subject's 'auto-personification' ( ibid ., p.147/120) serves as a necessary condition for the possibility of becoming ethical, of welcoming the Other. Moreover, contrary to Foucault's self-caring subject, who actively partakes in its own ethical self-formation, Levinas's existent has no educable ethical sensibility. It is powerless against the gravitational pull of its egoism, condemned to a hopeless amorality unless the Other intervenes and saves it from itself. I shall therefore argue that Foucault's account of ethical self-becoming invests the subject with a meta -physical potential, which it is denied by Levinas's ethical metaphysics. South African Journal of Philosophy Vol. 25(2) 2006: 113-125. (shrink)

Without a doubt, one of the main reasons Platonsim remains such a strong contender in the Foundations of Mathematics debate is because of the prima facie plausibility of the claim that objectivity needs objects. It seems like nothing else but the existence of external referents for the terms of our mathematical theories and calculations can guarantee the objectivity of our mathematical knowledge. The reason why Frege – and most Platonists ever since – could not adhere to the idea that mathematical (...) objects were mental, conventional or in any other way dependent on our faculties, will or other historical contingencies was that objects whose properties of existence depended on such contingencies could not warrant the objectivity required for scientific knowledge. This idea gained currency in the second half of the 19th Century and remains current for the most part today. However, it was not always like that. Objectivity, after all, has a history, and according to its historians (Daston 2001), the view that scientific knowledge need be objective is a fairly recent one. Up until mid-19th Century, science was not so much concerned with objectivity, as it was concerned with truth. Before the rise of the modern university and the professional scientist, science had the discovery of truths as its ultimate goal. In contrast, modern science now aims at the production and acquisition of objective knowledge. The difference might seem.. (shrink)

This book is a study of the second-edition version of the 'Transcendental Deduction', which is one of the most important and obscure sections of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. By way of a close analysis of the B-Deduction, Adam Dickerson makes the distinctive claim that the Deduction is crucially concerned with the problem of making intelligible the unity possessed by complex representations - a problem that is the representationalist parallel of the semantic problem of the unity of the proposition. Along (...) the way he discusses most of the key themes in Kant's theory of knowledge, including the nature of thought and representation, the notion of objectivity, and the way in which the mind structures our experience of the world. (shrink)

A new theory of particles proposed in an earlier paper is now applied to explain energy. Having earlier derived the Rydberg formula for atomic spectra without using the Pauli principle, the authors now derive the photoelectric effect, deflection of light by gravitation, and Planck's law for blackbody radiation without using Planck's assumption on energy quanta or Einstein's theory of general relativity.