The basis of Muslim philosophy and science is the instruction embedded in the Quran. At an early date this tradition was enlarged and strengthened by the infiltration into Muslim culture of Greek philosophy and science through the translation of Greek classics by Muslims. The Indian tradition of thought also made its contribution. This book traces the development and interaction of these strands in Muslim thinking. The author is concerned to show both how philosophy and science are related to specifically religious (...) thought, and how they have made distinctive contributions to method and discovery. (shrink)

In this expository paper, we examine some philosophical and technical issues brought by paraconsistency (such as, motivations for developing a paraconsistent logic, the nature of this logic, and its application to set theory). We also suggest a way of accommodating these issues by considering some problems in the philosophy of logic from a new perspective.

Offering a field-defining survey of the topic, this is the first book to engage all the key figures in the social imaginaries field. It offers new perspectives on the productive tension between social imaginaries and the creative imagination, providing the first programmatic approach to the field as a whole.

We often give culture a narrow definition, confining it to the sum of works of art or of science, and to institutions such as universities, middle schools, primary schools, and museums, and to language, civilized behavior, and the social superstructure. Under the influence of cultural anthropology, we have already come to accept a broader concept of culture, and that is that culture is the sum of the activity of humankind in accordance with a certain intention to transform nature or the (...) things of nature. In this sense, agriculture, dance, physical drills , education, the processes of economic activity, and ancient traditions all would belong to the category of culture. In life, even activities such as eating and sleeping are no longer considered purely natural behavior because they are different from the eating or sleeping of animals; rather, they have been transformed by culture, their shapes and states have been changed. For example, the way in which the Chinese people eat is different from the way that Europeans, or Americans, eat. The emphasis of this new and broader definition of culture is no longer on things; culture is no longer defined in reference to objects such as the products of a museum or a scientific product, but to an activity, such as a dance performance, or some form of cultural heritage in an ancient or a modern society. We can therefore draw a conclusion that the term "culture" is no longer a noun, referring to some kind of substance, but is a verb, and points to a process. (shrink)

Any theory of reduction that goes only so far as carried in Parts I and II does only half the job. Prima facie at least, there are cases of would-be reduction which seem torn between two conflicting intuitions. On the one side there is a strong intuition that reduction is involved, and a strongly retentive reduction at that. On the other side it seems that the concepts at one level cross-classify those at the other level, so that there is no (...) way to identify properties at one level with those at the other. There is evidence to suggest that there will be no unique mental state/neural state association that can be set up, because, e.g., many different parts of the nervous system are all capable of taking over ‘control’ of the one mental function. And it is alleged that infinitely many, worse: indefinitely many, different bio-chemo-physical states could correspond to the economic property ‘has a monetary system of economic exchange’; and similarly for the property ‘has just won a game of tennis’. Yet one doesn't want an economic system or a game of tennis to be some ghostly addition to the actual bio-chemo-physical processes and events involved. Similarly one hopes that neurophysiology allied with the rest of natural science will render human experience and behaviour explicable. (shrink)

In this response to Jonny Anomaly’s ‘Is Obesity a Public Health Problem?’ I argue, contra the author that public health actually increases individuals’ abilities to choose actions that further their health goals, specifically in the case of obesity. The intractability of obesity as an individual medical problem combined with the health benefits of modest (5–10 per cent of body weight) weight loss suggest that public health measures helping people make small changes in eating habits improve population health. I argue that (...) such measures are available to public health via behavioral economic research and policy proposals from libertarian paternalists. I respond to author’s claim that obesity does not constitute a public health problem because: (i) it is not an epidemic and (ii) obesity reduction is not a public good. I argue that epidemic status is not required for classification as a public health problem, but that obesity does have the status of an epidemic. I also point out flaws in author’s reasoning about obesity, public health and social costs. I conclude by suggesting that public health, in partnership with stakeholders and other areas of government, is poised to help create conditions for modest weight loss and increased population health overall. (shrink)

A new frame of reference, which in its fundamental structuring differs radically from the structuring of the familiar western Indo-European viewpoints (logical, mathematical, scientific, philosophical, etc.), already exists. Recently, by the strategem of systematically disallowing a previously unnoticed untenable assumption encoded in the traditional Western symbolic logics, set theories, etc., in particular and in the Western World-View in general, this frame of reference has generated its own, entirely non-traditional, formalized language. The Notre Dame Journal of Formal Logic has accepted for (...) publication a first paper presenting this non-standard formalized language (Hilgartner, 1975).As one of its accomplishments, this new frame of reference delivers a general theory of living. This theory purports to span the entire domain of what we call living systems, human or non-human. (shrink)

It is shown how the development of physics has involved making explicit what were homocentric projections which had heretofore been implicit, indeed inexpressible in theory. This is shown to support a particular notion of the invariant as the real. On this basis the divergence in ideals of physical intelligibility between Bohr and Einstein is set out. This in turn leads to divergent, but explicit, conceptions of objectivity and completeness for physical theory. *I am indebted to Dr. G. McLelland. Professor F. (...) Rohrlich and an anonymous referee of this journal for several improvements in the formulation of the paper. (shrink)

All the major inter-theoretic relations of fundamental science are asymptotic ones, e.g. quantum theory as Planck's constant h 0, yielding (roughly) Newtonian mechanics. Thus asymptotics ultimately grounds claims about inter-theoretic explanation, reduction and emergence. This paper examines four recent, central claims by Batterman concerning asymptotics and reduction. While these claims are criticised, the discussion is used to develop an enriched, dynamically-based account of reduction and emergence, to show its capacity to illuminate the complex variety of inter-theory relationships in physics, and (...) to provide a principled resolution to such persistent philosophical problems as multiple realisability and the nature of the special sciences. Introduction Exposition Examination I: Claims (1) and (2), asymptotic explanation and reference Examination II: Claim (3), reduction and singular asymptotics Examination III: Claim (4), emergence and multiple realisability Conclusion. (shrink)

Our trust in the word of others is often dismissed as unworthy, because the illusory ideal of "autonomous knowledge" has prevailed in the debate about the nature of knowledge. Yet we are profoundly dependent on others for a vast amount of what any of us claim to know. Coady explores the nature of testimony in order to show how it might be justified as a source of knowledge, and uses the insights that he has developed to challenge certain widespread assumptions (...) in the areas of history, law, mathematics, and psychology. (shrink)

The Three Papers comprising this series, together with my earlier [34] also published in this journal, constitute an attempt to set out the major issues in the theoretical domain of reduction and to develop a general theory of theory reduction. The fourth paper, [34], though published separately from this trio, is integral to the presentation and should be read in conjunction with these papers. Even so, the presentation is limited in scope – roughly, to intertheoretic reduction among empirical theories – (...) and informal in presentation – not least because a satisfying formal account of theories has yet to be offered. And despite the length, the treatment is still condensed; often corroborating and/or intuitively helpful detail has had to be consigned to footnotes or omitted. I approach the problem from within my own naturalistic realist philosophy of science and formal analysis of abstract hierarchy in theory. The sources for the former are [25], [29], [31], and [32] and those for the latter essentially [27] and [30]. Hierarchical notions played a significant role in the already published [34]. (shrink)