This book interrogates the nature and state of African American citizenship through the prism of Social Contract Theory. Challenging the United States’ commitment to African American citizenship, this book explores the idea of Social Nullification, the decision to reject, revoke and re-define the social contract with a state and society. Charles F. Peterson surveys the history of Social Contract Theory, examines Nullification as political and legal theory, argues public policy as a measure of the state’s commitment to the contractarian (...) relationship and frames the writings and activism of Martin R. Delany, Ida B. Wells-Barnett and the African American Reparations Movement as examples of Social Nullification and challenges to the terms of Black life in America. (shrink)

Natural law theories affirm that it belongs to the nature of law to be apt to promote the common good or do something similar. I defend a weak version of this thesis according to which part of what constitutes something as a nondefective central case of a posited law is that it is apt to promote the common good. Just as the rules of Pictionary require the drawing player to design her drawing to reveal the word in play, the rules (...) of a central case of a legal system require lawmakers to design laws to promote the common good. Therefore, just as a Pictionary drawing that is inapt to reveal the word in play is defective, a central case of a posited law that is inapt to promote the common good is defective. (shrink)

" -- Dr. Daniel Gardner, Cornell University Medical College Charles Stevens, a prominent neurobiologist who originally trained as a biophysicist (with George Uhlenbeck and Mark Kac), wrote this book almost by accident.

There is a review of how Mark Addis has made a case that it would require great effort for scant philosophical profit to formalize a notion of surveyability as a metamathematical predicate demarcating strict finitistic mathematics. It is then suggested how the notion of surveyability is useful in informal philosophizing about mathematics.

In The Gift of Jesus, beloved pastor and teacher Dr. Charles Stanley takes a deeply personal and inspiring look at how God gave us Himself through the birth of Christ. When He sent Jesus, He closed the separation between us, showing Himself to be intimately involved in every detail that concerns us. This book will usher you into Jesus' presence, reveal His compassionate heart, and help you treasure the best parts of the Advent season. --Amazon.com.

This article concerns the prescriptive function of decision analysis. Consider an agent who must choose an action yielding welfare that varies with an unknown state of nature. It is often asserted that such an agent should adhere to consistency axioms which imply that behavior can be represented as maximization of expected utility. However, our agent is not concerned the consistency of his behavior across hypothetical choice sets. He only wants to make a reasonable choice from the choice set that he (...) actually faces. Hence, I reason that prescriptions for decision making should respect actuality. That is, they should promote welfare maximization in the choice problem the agent actually faces. Any choice respecting weak and stochastic dominance is rational from the actualist perspective. (shrink)

We characterize Δ20-categoricity in Boolean algebras and linear orderings under some extra effectiveness conditions. We begin with a study of the relativized notion in these structures.

This essay reviews three recently published books on the intellectual history of the Italian Renaissance. In his survey of Italian humanism in the “long fifteenth century” (c. 1350–c. 1525) The Intellectual World of the Italian Renaissance, Christopher Celenza argues that the intellectual project of the humanists was centred on questions regarding language, philosophy, and the stance of the intellectual toward institutions. Celenza traces the fortunes and mutations of the humanist project into the modern era in The Italian Renaissance and the (...) Origins of the Humanities, and expresses concern that in today's universities the balance struck by the humanists between “openness” and “boundary-generating habits” unduly favours the latter. Humanism, according to James Hankins's Virtue Politics, was primarily about repairing politics by first reforming the moral character of Italy's ruling elites. The language and literature of Roman and Greek antiquity provided the models for this education in virtue. Hankins believes the humanists' educational and cultural programme offers a salutary corrective to our misplaced, post-Machiavellian trust in legal constraints and constitutional guardrails to regulate contemporary political life. (shrink)

In many classes of structures, each computable structure has computable dimension 1 or $\omega$. Nevertheless, Goncharov showed that for each $n < \omega$, there exists a computable structure with computable dimension $n$. In this paper we show that, under one natural definition of relativized computable dimension, no computable structure has finite relativized computable dimension greater than 1.

No detailed description available for "Strict finitism".

As time passed, I discovered with surprise that the important role I assigned to literature was not recognized by everyone.iThis essay constitutes one aspect of an overall project to spell out the implications for the literary arts of Wittgenstein's systematic distinction between acts of description that carry truth values and acts of expression that display states of mind and feeling but do not describe them. My full case will require a book. That is good news for me but bad news (...) for the present reader, since I feel I have to offer a painfully brief version of my overall theoretical position as a backdrop for what I will say about appreciation. Expressions elicit or solicit attunement rather than propose .. (shrink)

In a survey of information theory and some of its implications, Warren Weaver has proposed a distinction between engineering noise and semantic noise. Ordinary Spanish usage reflects this distinction quite neatly. If A speaks to B and B responds with no entiendo, it means ‘I have not heard your words, because of interfering sound or lack of attention; please transmit the same message again’; if he responds with no comprendo, it means ‘I heard you all right, but what I heard (...) doesn't make sense; please paraphrase or explain.’ Channel noise, thus, is the responsible factor when that which leaves a transmitter is not that which reaches the receiver; semantic noise is a discrepancy between the codes used by transmitter and receiver. (shrink)