This collection presents significant contributions from an international network project on mathematical cultures, including essays from leading scholars in the history and philosophy of mathematics and mathematics education.​ Mathematics has universal standards of validity. Nevertheless, there are local styles in mathematical research and teaching, and great variation in the place of mathematics in the larger cultures that mathematical practitioners belong to. The reflections on mathematical cultures collected in this book are of interest to mathematicians, philosophers, historians, sociologists, cognitive scientists and (...) mathematics educators. (shrink)

What accounts for the capacity of ordinary speakers to comprehend utterances of their language? The phenomenology of hearing speech in one’s own language makes it tempting to many epistemologists to look to perception for an answer to this question. That is, just as a visual experience as of a red square is often taken to give the perceiver immediate justification for believing that there is a red square in front of her, perhaps an auditory experience as of the speaker asserting (...) that p gives the competent hearer immediate justification for believing that the speaker has asserted that p. My aim here is to offer reasons for resisting this temptation. I argue that the perceptual model cannot adequately account for the hearer’s justification in many cases. The arguments here also allow us to draw certain further morals about the role of phenomenology in the epistemology of perception. (shrink)

From oral culture, through the advent of literacy, to the introduction of printing, to the development of electronic media, communication structures have radically altered culture in profound ways. As the first book to take a critical realist approach to culture, Theatre, Communication, Critical Realism examines theatre and its history through the interaction of society’s structures, agents, and discourses. Tobin Nellhaus shows that communication structure—a culture’s use and development of speech, handwriting, printing, and electronics—explains much about why, when, and how (...) theatre has transformed. (shrink)

English mass noun phrases & count noun phrases differ only minimally grammatically. The basis for the difference is ascribed to a difference in the features +/-CT. These features serve the morphosyntactic function of determining the available options for the assigment of grammatical number, itself determined by the features +/-PL: +CT places no restriction on the available options, while -CT, in the unmarked case, restricts the available options to -PL. They also serve the semantic function of determining the sort of denotation (...) associated with demonstrative & quantified noun phrases. The feature -CT requires that the associated denotation be the set whose sole member is the greatest aggregate of which the noun phrase or noun is true; the feature +CT requires that the associated denotation be the set whose members are all & only those minimal aggregates of which the noun phrase or noun is true. At the same time, neither mass NPs nor count NPs that are arguments of a predicate have their predicate evaluated with respect to their denotations. Rather, the predicate is evaluated with respect to an aggregation, a set of aggregates constructed from the denotation of the noun phrase that is an argument of the predicate. 3 Tables, 4 Figures, 74 References. AA. (shrink)

Even though sign-systems are a crucial part of society, critical realism, as developed by Roy Bhaskar, does not yet have an adequate theory of signs and semiosis. The few suggestions that Bhaskar offers can be advanced through the semiotics of C.S. Peirce. In doing so, however, it becomes necessary to reconsider Bhaskar's ontological domains of the real, the actual, and the subjective, and expand the last domain into one of semiosis. This new understanding of ontological domains, incorporating Peirceian semiotics, provides (...) the basis for rethinking the ontology of society: the customary dyad structures/agents becomes the triad structures/agents/discourses, each of which possesses material, sociological, and meaningful aspects. (shrink)

_Lakatos: An Introduction_ provides a thorough overview of both Lakatos's thought and his place in twentieth century philosophy. It is an essential and insightful read for students and anyone interested in the philosophy of science.

Offering the perspectives of some of the most respected thinkers in transpersonal psychology and consciousness studies, this book explores the farther reaches ...

Purcell, Brendan The Focolare Movement is officially known as the Work of Mary, and since it is primarily a lay movement, it falls under the authority of the Congregation for the Laity. Its founder, Chiara Lubich, was born in Trent in 1920, the second of four children, into a close-knit family. Her mother was a devout daily Massgoing Catholic, her father, a socialist, uninterested in religion, but a man of principle, whose refusal to join the Fascist party lost him (...) any chance of a regular job after the 1929 Depression. (shrink)

As modern viewers, it is tempting to interpret Frank and Claire’s manipulations of democratic institutions as representing perversions or distortions of democratic ideals. After all, most of us think (or at least hope!) that real-world democracies we actually live in aren’t quite that badly governed. Whatever the moral faults of our leaders are, they don’t (as a rule) murder journalists, crudely provoke international crises for political gain, or cleverly set up their political adversaries with Bond-villain-like cunning. Real politicians, so the (...) story goes, lack the cleverness, the ruthlessness, and the luck of the Underwoods. While this sort of faith in the general validity of democratic ideals and institutions is now widely shared, the Underwoods’ clever “gaming” of the system can also be seen as providing an especially clear illustration of some of the things that might be inherently wrong with democracy. In this essay, I’ll take a look at how the Underwoods’ behavior might look to some of the most famous critics of democratic government, including Plato, Thomas Hobbes, and Karl Marx. According to these thinkers, the most significant flaws that Underwoods exploit to gain political power have little, if anything, to do with the peculiarity of their talents, the weaknesses of the individuals around them, or even the structures of the US political system. Instead, their success is made possible by certain fundamental features of democratic government, features that guarantee both the instability and eventual failure of any democratic government. On this reading, the fact of the Underwoods’ success presents a significant problem for all of us, since it changes the question from “How do real-world democratic politicians differ from the Underwoods?” to the much-more-difficult “What’s so great about democracy in the first place?”. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Politics and Peace Tobin Siebers University ofMichigan To Perpetual Peace. Whether this satirical inscription on a certain Dutch shopkeeper's sign, on which a graveyard was painted, holds for men in general, or especially for heads ofstate who can never get enough of war, or perhaps only for the philosophers who dream this sweet dream, is not for us to decide. However, the author of this essay does set (...) out one condition.... The practical politician must not claim, in the event of a dispute with a theorist, to detect some danger to the nation in those views that the political theorist expresses openly and without ulterior motive.... By this clausula salvatoria, the author ofthis essay will regard himselfto be expressly protected in the best way possible from all malicious interpretation. (Immanuel Kant, Preface to Perpetual Peace) My goal is to work my way back to Kant's defensive preface to Perpetual Peace, the prophetic essay situated by many at the origin ofmodern conceptions ofpeace and international diplomacy. Suffice it to say for the moment that the following reflections are intended to reveal the epitaph in Kant's epigraph—the eternal repose residing in perpetual peace. Imagining relation One of the master ideas to come down to us from the eighteenth century holds that the imagination is central to all relations between self and other, however one might designate this otherness. The imagination is central to Adam Smith's idea of sympathy, and Kant uses it as a bridge to 86Tobin Siebers unify his critical philosophy. Whether referring to objects or other people, we require a faculty by which to extend understanding to them, and this faculty continues even today to be described as imaginative. Postmodern theorists, for example, conceive of human relations in terms of identity politics, but at the core of identification is the power to imagine, be it the power to sympathize or to conceive of a party different from oneself. In effect, then, relation is itself a function of the imagination. Moreover, no relation, I want to claim, exists for long that cannot be well imagined, for which some symbolic object or idea cannot be found. The four dominant modes of relation are religion, aesthetics, ethics, and politics.1 They deserve to be called modes insofar as they name different others to which the self (or another principal) may relate imaginatively. Religion is about the relation of goodness between subject and god called the sublime. Often nature, fate, or providence as personified forces or overarching systems are also called sublime. Aesthetics is about the relation of goodness between subject and object called beauty. Ethics is about the relation of goodness between subjects called character or virtue. Finally, politics is about the relation ofgoodness between communities called peace. Peace may seem at first glance to be an odd choice to name the relation of goodness in politics. A more obvious candidate might be the idea of utopia. But utopia comes into being as a concept only with Thomas More's treatise in 1516, and this late invention seems to exclude its being considered as the privileged good of politics. Moreover, the traditional opposition between ethics and politics exposes the unfitness ofutopia as a candidate for the political good. Ethics and politics are often at war because ethics does not want to sacrifice even one person to improve the relations among other people. Ethics strives for a wholly inclusive community, but it defines this community as a collection of autonomous individuals having value in themselves only as ends and never as means to an end. If ethics aims at a wholly inclusive community of individuals, then "utopia" may be described by rights as an ethical concept, regardless ofthe fact that Utopian desire seems to stress the wrong perspective on this community, coming as it does from the collective rather than the individual point of view. The ethical dimension of the Utopian is made obvious by the realization that a 1 I will not discuss cognition, although it is surely dominant, because its objects are various, whereas the modes ofrelation of interest to me here tend to represent their objects as being of a certain kind. Politics and Peace87 utopia... (shrink)

According to current hierarchies of evidence for EBM, evidence of correlation (e.g., from RCTs) is always more important than evidence of mechanisms when evaluating and establishing causal claims. We argue that evidence of mechanisms needs to be treated alongside evidence of correlation. This is for three reasons. First, correlation is always a fallible indicator of causation, subject in particular to the problem of confounding; evidence of mechanisms can in some cases be more important than evidence of correlation when assessing a (...) causal claim. Second, evidence of mechanisms is often required in order to obtain evidence of correlation (for example, in order to set up and evaluate RCTs). Third, evidence of mechanisms is often required in order to generalise and apply causal claims. While the EBM movement has been enormously successful in making explicit and critically examining one aspect of our evidential practice, i.e., evidence of correlation, we wish to extend this line of work to make explicit and critically examine a second aspect of our evidential practices: evidence of mechanisms. (shrink)

These days it is widely agreed that there is no such thing as absolute motion and rest; the motion of an object can only be characterized with respect to some chosen frame of reference.1 This is a fact of which many of us are well-aware, and yet a cursory consideration of the ways we ascribe motion to objects gives the impression that it is a fact we persistently ignore. We insist to the police officer that we came to a full (...) and complete stop at the stop sign, we fret that traffic is moving too slowly, we observe that the sun has dropped below the hills on the horizon, all without ever saying which frames of reference we have in mind. (shrink)

The collection of very large text sources has revolutionized the study of natural language, leading to the development of several models of language learning and distributional semantics that extract sophisticated semantic representations of words based on the statistical redundancies contained within natural language. The models treat knowledge as an interaction of processing mechanisms and the structure of language experience. But language experience is often treated agnostically. We report a distributional semantic analysis that shows written language in fiction books varies appreciably (...) between books from the different genres, books from the same genre, and even books written by the same author. Given that current theories assume that word knowledge reflects an interaction between processing mechanisms and the language environment, the analysis shows the need for the field to engage in a more deliberate consideration and curation of the corpora used in computational studies of natural language processing. (shrink)

Bernadette M Tobin; Development in Virtues, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 20, Issue 2, 30 May 2006, Pages 201–214, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9.

Mechanistic philosophy of science views a large part of scientific activity as engaged in modelling mechanisms. While science textbooks tend to offer qualitative models of mechanisms, there is increasing demand for models from which one can draw quantitative predictions and explanations. Casini et al. (Theoria 26(1):5–33, 2011) put forward the Recursive Bayesian Networks (RBN) formalism as well suited to this end. The RBN formalism is an extension of the standard Bayesian net formalism, an extension that allows for modelling the hierarchical (...) nature of mechanisms. Like the standard Bayesian net formalism, it models causal relationships using directed acyclic graphs. Given this appeal to acyclicity, causal cycles pose a prima facie problem for the RBN approach. This paper argues that the problem is a significant one given the ubiquity of causal cycles in mechanisms, but that the problem can be solved by combining two sorts of solution strategy in a judicious way. (shrink)

One way to challenge the substantiveness of a particular philosophical issue is to argue that those who debate the issue are engaged in a merely verbal dispute. For example, it has been maintained that the apparent disagreement over the mind/brain identity thesis is a merely verbal dispute, and thus that there is no substantive question of whether or not mental properties are identical to neurological properties. The goal of this paper is to help clarify the relationship between mere verbalness and (...) substantiveness. I first argue that we should see mere verbalness as a certain kind of discourse defect that arises when the parties differ as to what each takes to be the immediate question under discussion. I then argue that mere verbalness, so understood, does not imply that the question either party is attempting to address is a non-substantive one. Even if it turns out that the parties to the mind/brain dispute are addressing subtly different questions, these might both be substantive questions to which their respective metaphysical views provide substantive answers. One reason it is tempting to reach deflationary conclusions from the charge of mere verbalness is that we fail to distinguish it from the claim that a sentence under dispute is, in a certain sense, indisputable. Another reason is that we fail to distinguish mere verbalness from a certain sort of indeterminacy. While indisputability and indeterminacy plausibly capture forms of nonsubstantiveness, I argue that mere verbalness is insufficient to establish either indisputability or indeterminacy. (shrink)

Alaska s Aleutian Island chain, barren and windswept, arcs for over a thousand miles toward Asia from the Alaska Peninsula. In this remote and hostile archipelago is Kiska, an uninhabited sub-arctic speck in the tempestuous Bering Sea. Few have the opportunity even to visit this island, but in June of 1942 Japanese troops seized Kiska and neighboring Attu in the only occupation of North American territory since the War of 1812. The bastion of Japan s possessions in Alaska, Kiska was (...) soon fortified with 7,500 enemy troops, a seaplane base, naval anchorage and submarine base, heavy guns and a labyrinth of tunnels. For thirteen months Japanese troops held a tenuous hold on the island under constant bombardment from American forces, but finally and successfully abandoning the island. So hurried was the evacuation that equipment and personal effects were left behind. The Japanese occupiers of Kiska have remained shadowy figures. Brendan Coyle spent 51 days on Kiska searching out the tunnels, equipment and personal effects frozen in time. Those objects are brought back to life in the over three hundred images Coyle has assembled from his own visit and from archives. His writing puts the images in historical and contemporary perspective, opening a new window on a remote battlefield and unforgiving landscape.". (shrink)

In this vivid and incisive guide, philosophy comes to life. Using the central idea of causality as a guiding principle, Brendan Wilson shows how the history of philosophy becomes a very clear and natural sequence of events. The resulting perspective reveals the deep connections between the problems of science, mind and reality, freedom and responsibility, knowledge, language, truth and religion. Newcomers to philosophy will be able to engage with the great questions and ideas of the western tradition. The writing (...) is clear and jargon-free, while the 'short-chapter' format gives the reader time to pause and think at each step along the way. Style and layout put accessibility first and the many illustrations include explanatory diagrams and drawings as well as pictures of philosophers from Aristotle to Wittgenstein. Key Features Encourages critical and independent thinking Written in an engaging, non-technical style Makes clear sense of philosophy's rich and complex history Presents a distinctive argument Provides a wide range of case studies and examples from philosophy, science and law Text Features Chapter overviews Chapter sub-headings for ease of use Carefully-chosen quotations from philosophers ancient and modern End of chapter discussion points An open and attractive page layout Lavish and relevant illustrations, including photographs, diagrams, explanatory boxes and drawings. (shrink)

Evidence-based medicine (EBM) makes use of explicit procedures for grading evidence for causal claims. Normally, these procedures categorise evidence of correlation produced by statistical trials as better evidence for a causal claim than evidence of mechanisms produced by other methods. We argue, in contrast, that evidence of mechanisms needs to be viewed as complementary to, rather than inferior to, evidence of correlation. In this paper we first set out the case for treating evidence of mechanisms alongside evidence of correlation in (...) explicit protocols for evaluating evidence. Next we provide case studies which exemplify the ways in which evidence of mechanisms complements evidence of correlation in practice. Finally, we put forward some general considerations as to how the two sorts of evidence can be more closely integrated by EBM. (shrink)

This encyclopedia article traces the development of Richard J. Bernstein's philosophical work and provide s short biography.

The plays in this new volume were written early in Marcel’s career, and were published together under the title Le Seuil invisible (The Invisible Threshold) in 1913. The first play, Grace, explores the theme of religious conversion. The drama depicts a crisis between characters of genuine depth and sincerity, who are struggling with different interpretations of shared experiences. Similar themes are addressed but developed differently in the second play, The Sandcastle. This drama explores the confrontation between one’s beliefs and their (...) consequences when faced with challenging family and social circumstances. The play asks us to think about what happens when our beliefs and theories, especially about religion, morality and politics, come up against situations in life that can test them. Both plays illustrate one of the major themes of both Marcel’s dramatic and philosophical work: that life’s most profound, fulfilling experiences are compromised more than ever in what he describes as the modern, broken world (le monde cassé), one unfortunately characterized by alienation, loss of meaning and feelings of despair. (shrink)

This paper argues that promises are proposals in joint practical deliberation, the activity of deciding together what to do. More precisely: to promise to ϕ is to propose (in a particular way) to decide together with your addressee(s) that you will ϕ. I defend this deliberative theory by showing that the activity of joint practical deliberation naturally gives rise to a speech act with exactly the same properties as promises. A certain kind of proposal to make a joint decision regarding (...) one's own actions turns out to have the very same normative effects, under the very same conditions, as a promise. I submit that this cannot be a coincidence: we should conclude that promises and the relevant kind of proposals in joint practical deliberation are one and the same. (shrink)

Foucault’s posthumously-published late work on epimeleia heautou might inaugurate a new partnership between classicists and Foucault. This work, however, has been misconstrued in recent classical scholarship, an important instance of which I consider here. I remedy the errors of one of Foucault’s classical interpreters; diagnose the reasons for the errors; and briefly suggest the transformative potential of Foucault’s work for students of antiquity.

James Bohman’s Democracy across borders: from demos to demoi is a rich and deep text. It is also deceptively short in length in comparison to those authors he engages and compactly reconstructs. Bohman puts forward strong normative arguments for a ‘reconstructed’ ideal of transnational democracy and provides models for realizing these ideals that also aim to meet standards of practicability. Bohman articulates the minimum necessary conditions for any democratic ideal in terms of freedom from domination and freedom to initiate and (...) engage in efficacious democratic deliberation across the borders of currently existing political communities. The argument charts a novel democratic ideal in terms of the global deliberative situation that is fundamentally different from the authors he discusses in light of existing facts about globalization, institutions, and the pluralism of demoi. In these comments I will focus on two main areas. (shrink)

One of the great philosophical and theological debates in the second half of the thirteenth century concerned the metaphysical constitution of angels, namely whether they are, like trees and cats and humans, composed of "form" and "matter," in the sense given those terms by the then newly ascendant Aristotle.1 In this period, the field was roughly divided between universal hylomorphism, maintaining that angels are form/matter composites, and spiritual immaterialism, maintaining that spiritual beings such as angels are pure, self-subsistent forms. The (...) former position was championed especially though not exclusively by Franciscan theologians (notably the "Seraphic Doctor," St. Bonaventure of... (shrink)

This textbook, which is completely self-contained and can be read by anyone with a secondary school education, is the result of the author's material prepared over the past 15 years of teaching introductory natural language semantics to graduate and undergraduate students at McGill University. The intended audience comprises undergraduate and graduate students in linguistics as well as those in philosophy, computer science and psychology with an interest in natural language semantics. The aim of the textbook is to teach the fundamentals (...) of natural language semantics, with English as the principal, though not the exclusive, target language. The principal aim of the textbook is to provide the student with all the basics necessary to be able him or her read research in natural language semantics, regardless of the theory assumed by the author of the research. In contrast to other textbooks in the field, which aim to introduce students to a particular theory of natural language semantics, this textbook seeks to give to its reader a clear overview of the kind of natural language phenomena which, at least prima facie, fall within the ambit of an investigation of natural language semantics; to assist the reader in developing a mastery of the mathematical tools used to formulate hypotheses about the natural language phenomena studied; and to impart to the reader an appreciation of the interplay between hypothesis and data. As a result, the textbook is rich in its presentation of the patterns of English, drawing extensively on the best and most contemporary descriptive grammars of English. The textbook also has more than 500 exercises, with answers to half of them. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Triangular Landscapes: Environment, Society, and the State in the Nile Delta under Roman Rule by Katherine BlouinBrendan HaugKatherine Blouin. Triangular Landscapes: Environment, Society, and the State in the Nile Delta under Roman Rule. London and New York: Oxford University Press, 2014. xxvi + 429 pp. 14 halftones, 28 tables, 5 maps. Cloth, $150.00.American journalist Hal Boyle is often said to have remarked, “What makes a river so restful (...) to people is that it doesn’t have any doubt—it is sure to get where it is going and it doesn’t want to go anywhere else.” Restful, perhaps. But the single-mindedness of a river’s flow can also be a source of anxiety. In contemporary America, the Lower Mississippi’s steady westward shift is a prominent example. Were its floodgates removed and the river allowed to “get where it is going,” it would soon abandon the cities of Baton Rouge and New Orleans, decimating their port-dependent economies.An awareness of such fluvial hazards has percolated into the study of ancient history over the last decade and a half, and works on the ancient Mediterranean’s riverine environments have been appearing with frequency. As in ancient environmental [End Page 528] history more broadly, Francophone scholars have led the way; Philippe Leveau’s work on the Rhône and the multiple colloquia spearheaded by Ella Hermon are particularly notable (e.g., Philippe Leveau, ed. “Le Rhône romain,” Gallia 56 [1999]; Ella Hermon, ed. Riparia dans l’Empire romain [2010]). On the Anglophone side, Gregory Aldrete’s Floods of the Tiber in Ancient Rome 2007, Peter Thonemann’s The Maeander Valley 2011, and Brian Campbell’s Rivers and the Power of Ancient Rome 2012 are essential.Katherine Blouin’s new study of the Mendesian nome (administrative division) in Egypt’s northeastern Nile Delta unites these twin streams. The book, an updated version of a French dissertation supervised by Hermon, focuses on the changing course and eventual extinction of the Nile’s Mendesian branch, documenting the effects of a shifting fluvial landscape, environmental stressors, and Roman agro-fiscal policy on the society and economy of the Delta during the first few centuries c.e. By merging Francophone scholarship on rivers, theoretical perspectives drawn from American environmental history, and a thorough command of the papyrological evidence, Blouin has made a significant contribution to the emerging field of ancient environmental history.In her introduction, Blouin grounds herself in what Hermon dubs “l’approche écosystémique” to environmental history. Casting aside environmental determinism and lachrymose tales of pristine nature violated (“l’approche égologique”), ecosystems thinking characterizes environments as “dynamic, multidimensional entities made up of a complex amalgam of continuities and ruptures” (7). While humanity is regarded as a constituent element of the natural world, human beings nonetheless possess the ability to adapt natural phenomena in significant ways. Thus, nature’s impacts upon society are never predetermined, for they are always mediated by human decision-making at multiple levels.The rest of the book is divided into four thematic sections. Part I situates the reader within the geomorphological and hydrological contexts of the Mendesian nome and reviews the surviving evidence. Parts II and III reconstruct the landscape and investigate agricultural diversification. Part IV offers environmental perspectives on a fiscal crisis in the late second century c.e. and the famous revolt of the Boukoloi.Synthesizing previous geomorphological and archaeological scholarship, chapter 1 traces the evolution of the Nile Delta from at least seven major branches to the modern two—the Rosetta and Damietta—by the early Arab period, a process significantly abetted by large-scale canalization projects (35). (See also John P. Cooper, The Medieval Nile [2014], who carries the story forward.)In chapter 2, Blouin surveys the archaeological and papyrological evidence for the Mendesian nome. Although excavations at its two ancient metropoleis of Mendes (Tell al-Rub’a) and Thmuis (Tell al-Timai) are ongoing—the latter partly under Blouin’s own direction—their evidence is secondary to her arguments, which depend primarily upon the papyri. This corpus is comprised of some ninety texts spanning the fourth century b.c.e. to the sixth century c.e., the majority... (shrink)