Twelve essays exploring aspects of literacy and art criticism, retrospective sociology and the effects of relativism on moral behavior.

I consider the potential of eight text-scaling methods for the analysis of jurisprudential change. I use a small corpus of well-documented German Federal Constitutional Court opinions on European integration to compare the machine-generated scores to scholarly accounts of the case law and legal expert ratings. Naive Bayes, Word2Vec, Correspondence Analysis and Latent Semantic Analysis appear to perform well. Less convincing are the performance of Wordscores, ML Affinity and lexicon-based sentiment analysis. While both the high-dimensionality of judicial texts and the validation (...) of computer-based jurisprudential estimates pose major methodological challenges, I conclude that automated text-scaling methods hold out great promise for legal research. (shrink)

In this issue, Raphael Cohen-Almagor reviews some of the terms used in the discussion of bioethical issues at the end of a patient's life; he argues that they are “valueladen” and serve “primarily the physicians, at times at the expense of the patients’ best interest.” Each of the following terms comes under scrutiny: “death with dignity,” “persistent vegetative state,” “futility,” “double effect,” and “brain death.” He argues that these concepts, developed in recent decades, “have generated an unhealthy atmosphere for patients, (...) which might lead to undesirable actions at the end of patients’ lives.” He issues a plea to discontinue the use of the term “persistent vegetative state” because it is dehumanizing, to explain “double effect” and “futility” in detail and with sincerity, and to clarify the motivation for using these terms and others. He warns physicians not to use terminology that is offensive to patients and loved ones or that weakens their patients’ will to live. (shrink)

Since 1984, when he became art critic for _The Nation_, Arthur C. Danto, one of America's most inventive and influential philosophers, has also emerged as one of our most important critics of art. As an essayist, Danto's style is at once rigorous, incisive, and playful. _Encounters and Reflections_ brings together many of his recent critical writings—on artists such as Andy Warhol, David Hockney, and Robert Mapplethorpe; and on the significance of issues like the masterpiece and the museum. The result (...) is a spirited brief from the front lines of current aesthetic and philosophical debate. (shrink)

There is a considerable sub-literature, stretching back over 35 years, addressed to the question: Precisely which general terms ought to be classified as rigid designators? More fundamentally: What should we take the criterion for rigidity to be, for general terms? The aim of this paper is to give new grounds for the old view that if a general term designates the same kind in all possible worlds, then it should be classified as a rigid designator. The new grounds in question (...) have to do with excavating the connection between rigid designation and semantic structure. Other original contributions of the present work consist in developing responses to some objections to this approach to rigid designation. (shrink)

We prove two theorems which in a certain sense show that the number of normal measures a measurable cardinal κ can carry is independent of a given fixed behavior of the continuum function on any set having measure 1 with respect to every normal measure over κ . First, starting with a model V ⊨ “ZFC + GCH + o = δ*” for δ* ≤ κ+ any finite or infinite cardinal, we force and construct an inner model N ⊆ V (...) [G] so thatN ⊨ “ZF + [DCδ] + ¬ACκ + κ carries exactly δ* normal measures + 2δ = δ++ on a set having measure 1 with respect to every normal measure over κ”.There is nothing special about 2δ = δ here, and other stated values for the continuum function will be possible as well. Then, starting with a modelV ⊨ “ZFC + GCH + κis supercompact”,we force and construct models of AC in which, roughly speaking, regardless of the specified behavior of the continuum function below κ on any set having measure 1 with respect to every normal measure over κ, κ can in essence carry any number of normal measures δ* ≥ κ++. (shrink)

Excerpt from Kants Naturphilosophie als Grundlage Seines Systems Die vorliegende Arbeit uber die kantische Naturphilosophie war ursprunglich in Aussicht genommen als erstes Kapitel einer Darstellung der deutschen Naturphilosophie seit Kam. Der Grund, warum sie zu einem selbstandigen Werke angeschwollen ist, liegt darin, weil ich bei genauerem Studium des Philosophen fand, man habe das naturphilosophische Element in den Schriften Kants bisher bei weitem unterschatzt und insbesondere seinen Bemuhungen um eine dynamische Theorie der Materie lange nicht diejenige Bedeutung zugeschrieben, die ihnen sowohl (...) in Hinsicht auf die Richtung, welche die kantische Gedankenentwickelung genommen hat, wie fur die eigentumliche Ausbildung dieser Gedanken im Einzelnen thatsachlich beizumessen ist. Man hat den Philosophen nach seiner theoretischen Seite fast lediglich als den Begrunder der modernen Erkenntnistheorie gewurdigt und dabei ubersehen, wie seine ganze Erkenntnistheorie aus naturphilosophischen Erwagungen hervorgegangen und oft in den wichtigsten Punkten von ihnen bestimmt worden ist. Die vorliegende Arbeit schopft nun bei der Hochflut der philosophischen Litteratur, die sich mit Kant beschaftigt, ihre Daseinsberechtigung vor allem daraus, dafs sie die gesamte theoretische Philosophie Kants unter dem Gesichtspunkte der Naturphilosophie betrachtet. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.". (shrink)