Norway’s living kidney donation-rate is among the highest in the world ( 36 per million ). According to questionnaire-results, donors enjoy better than average health, presumably due to the strict medical criteria for being allowed to donate and life long medical follow up. However, in recent years international studies have cast doubt on the predominantly positive picture of donors and recipients, particularly regarding psychological aspects of transplantation surgery and donor evalutation. Findings in this study derive from anthropological fieldwork lasting 36 (...) months at three university hospitals in the Oslo-basin. 18 end stage kidney disease patients and their potential donors were recruited opportunistically and interviewed (separately) in three or more semi-structured conversations during the evaluation process and after transplantation. 3 cases are discussed in detail. Notes were transcribed and analysed according to narrative theory. Focus was to explore the content of donors’ and recipients’ pre- and post-transplantation narratives and to examine whether these accounts warrant a need for more comprehensive psychological assessment than is current practice in Norway. Donor- and recipient-narratives are well suited as a tool to improve living kidney donation-decisions. The material indicates a need to offer psychological care to LKD-partners, before and after transplantation. (shrink)

We study the logical and computational properties of basic theorems of uncountable mathematics, in particular Pincherle's theorem, published in 1882. This theorem states that a locally bounded function is bounded on certain domains, i.e. one of the first ‘local-to-global’ principles. It is well-known that such principles in analysis are intimately connected to (open-cover) compactness, but we nonetheless exhibit fundamental differences between compactness and Pincherle's theorem. For instance, the main question of Reverse Mathematics, namely which set existence axioms are necessary to (...) prove Pincherle's theorem, does not have an unique or unambiguous answer, in contrast to compactness. We establish similar differences for the computational properties of compactness and Pincherle's theorem. We establish the same differences for other local-to-global principles, even going back to Weierstrass. We also greatly sharpen the known computational power of compactness, for the most shared with Pincherle's theorem however. Finally, countable choice plays an important role in the previous, we therefore study this axiom together with the intimately related Lindelöf lemma. (shrink)

This article explains and discusses the relationship between traditional legislative processes and the development of automated government decision-making systems. The juridical aspects of systems development should be regarded as invisible quasi-legislation. The author investigates and discusses possible ways of changing the legislative process with a view to increasing and improving political involvement in processes today often regarded as mere implementation, and thereby safeguard that important parts of the law of our computerised society is situated in the public domain.

A semantics may be compositional and yet partial, in the sense that not all well-formed expressions are assigned meanings by it. Examples come from both natural and formal languages. When can such a semantics be extended to a total one, preserving compositionality? This sort of extension problem was formulated by Hodges, and solved there in a particular case, in which the total extension respects a precise version of the fregean dictum that the meaning of an expression is the contribution it (...) makes to the meanings of complex phrases of which it is a part. Hodges' result presupposes the so-called Husserl property, which says roughly that synonymous expressions must have the same category. Here I solve a different version of the compositional extension problem, corresponding to another type of linguistic situation in which we only have a partial semantics, and without assuming the Husserl property. I also briefly compare Hodges' framework for grammars in terms of partial algebras with more familiar ones, going back to Montague, which use many-sorted algebras instead. (shrink)

This article provides an introduction to Kaplan-style semantics. The formal semantics usually employs the notion of a model, which, besides supplying the sets utterance contexts, circumstances and a domain M 0 of individuals, and also interprets the nonlogical atomic expressions of the language. Standard compositionality applies only to character: Funct makes immediate sense, since character assigns a semantic value directly to expressions. For semantic functions taking contextual arguments, the notion of compositionality must be revised. Notions of contextual compositionality apply directly (...) to the functional version of the setup that starts with the function char, and defines the other semantics from it. The point of evaluation semantics is indeed basic: if it is compositional, so is the content semantics, and the character semantics. (shrink)

This volume examines the notion of an analytic proof as a natural deduction, suggesting that the proof's value may be understood as its normal form--a concept with significant implications to proof-theoretic semantics.

Reviewed Works:Gaisi Takeuti, Proof Theory.Georg Kreisel, Proof Theory: Some Personal Recollections.Wolfram Pohlers, Contributions of the Schutte School in Munich to Proof Theory.Stephen G. Simpson, Subsystems of $\mathbf{Z}_2$ and Reverse Mathematics.Solomon Feferman, Proof Theory: A Personal Report.

An inference can be seen as a speech act, in which one passes from a number of assertions called premisses to another assertion, the conclusion, which is presented as supported or justified by the premisses. To justify the assertion that appears as conclusion is the characteristic aim of an inference. Here, we confine ourselves to deductive inferences where the justification is taken to be conclusive. A short, natural explanation of what it is for a (deductive) inference to be valid is (...) to say that it is valid if it succeeds in its aim, that is, if its premisses do (conclusively) justify the conclusion, given that premisses are justified. The paper is concerned with developing this explanation further. (shrink)

This article discusses the understanding of bullying and how it first appears as a phenomenon in early childhood. Empirical research on the social life of young children indicates a capacity for empathy that is independent of social learning. Based upon Merleau-Ponty`s philosophy of the body and Levinas’s existentialist notion of the origin of morality, the article emphasize empathy and the sense of responsibility as a fundamental event in our initial encounter with one another – not learned competence based on cognitive (...) refl ections. Anti-social behavior like bullying is therefore considered to be a narrowing of the initial openness for others entering our life-world, not a result of a natural urge to power and dominance. (shrink)

The main question addressed in this chapter is how to analyze the modal ingredient in the concept of logical consequence or logical validity of an inference, here expressed by saying that the truth of the conclusion of a logically valid inference should follow by necessity of thought from the truth of the premisses. It is claimed that this modal ingredient is not taken care of by Tarski’s requirement, later developed in model theory, that for all interpretations of the non-logical terms (...) of the sentences, the conclusion is true if the premisses are. Instead we must bring in reasoning or the notion of proof in the analysis, and it is shown how one may develop a notion of proof or validity of an argument based on the constructive meaning of the logical constants. It is proposed that from a constructive point of view, a sentence is a consequence of a set of premisses if and only if there is a proof in the sense explained of the sentence from the set of premisses. Knowledge of such a proof compels us to hold the conclusion true given that we hold the premisses true. (shrink)

Ethics in business and economics is often attacked for being too superficial. By elaborating the conclusions of two such critics of business ethics and welfare economics respectively, this article will draw the attention to the ethics behind these apparently well-intended, but not always convincing constructions, by help of the fundamental ethics of Emmanuel Levinas. To Levinas, responsibility is more basic than language, and thus also more basic than all social constructions. Co-operation relations in organizations, markets and value networks are generated (...) from personal relations and personal responsibilities. It is not sufficient to integrate ethics in an impersonal, rational system, neither in business organizations nor in the world economy. Ethics has its source not in rationality, but in the personal. (shrink)

There are two main routes to a concept of (generalized) quantifier. The first starts from first‐order logic, FO, and generalizes from the familiar ∀ and ∃ occurring there. The second route begins with real languages, and notes that many so‐called noun phrases, a kind of phrase which occurs abundantly in most languages, can be interpreted in a natural and uniform way using quantifiers.

This note explains the circumstances under which a type 1 quantifier can be decomposed into a type 1, 1 quantifier and a set, by fixing the first argument of the former to the latter. The motivation comes from the semantics of Noun Phrases (also called Determiner Phrases) in natural languages, but in this article, I focus on the logical facts. However, my examples are taken among quantifiers appearing in natural languages, and at the end, I sketch two more principled linguistic (...) applications. (shrink)

What is the appropriate notion of truth for sentences whose meanings are understood in epistemic terms such as proof or ground for an assertion? It seems that the truth of such sentences has to be identified with the existence of proofs or grounds, and the main issue is whether this existence is to be understood in a temporal sense as meaning that we have actually found a proof or a ground, or if it could be taken in an abstract, tenseless (...) sense. Would the latter alternative amount to realism with respect to proofs or grounds in a way that would be contrary to the supposedly anti-realistic standpoint underlying the epistemic understanding of linguistic expressions? Before discussing this question, I shall consider reasons for construing linguistic meaning epistemically and relations between such reasons and reasons for taking an anti-realist point of view towards the discourse in question. (shrink)

It has been common in contemporary logic and philosophy of logic to identify the validity of an inference with its conclusion being a (logical) consequence of its premisses.

We study the logical and computational properties of basic theorems of uncountable mathematics, including the Cousin and Lindelöf lemma published in 1895 and 1903. Historically, these lemmas were among the first formulations of open-cover compactness and the Lindelöf property, respectively. These notions are of great conceptual importance: the former is commonly viewed as a way of treating uncountable sets like e.g. [Formula: see text] as “almost finite”, while the latter allows one to treat uncountable sets like e.g. [Formula: see text] (...) as “almost countable”. This reduction of the uncountable to the finite/countable turns out to have a considerable logical and computational cost: we show that the aforementioned lemmas, and many related theorems, are extremely hard to prove, while the associated sub-covers are extremely hard to compute. Indeed, in terms of the standard scale (based on comprehension axioms), a proof of these lemmas requires at least the full extent of second-order arithmetic, a system originating from Hilbert–Bernays’ Grundlagen der Mathematik. This observation has far-reaching implications for the Grundlagen’s spiritual successor, the program of Reverse Mathematics, and the associated Gödel hierarchy. We also show that the Cousin lemma is essential for the development of the gauge integral, a generalization of the Lebesgue and improper Riemann integrals that also uniquely provides a direct formalization of Feynman’s path integral. (shrink)

This paper focuses on how revolts against caste-based oppression in India have been made invisible due to conceptual legacies in European social and political theory. Weber’s and Arendt’s conceptualization of Pariah agency is a case in point. Arendt’s main understanding of Pariah agency is individualized and inadequate to study freedom struggles among untouchable castes. This article argues that one not only needs to move away from analyzing individual to collective action, but it is also crucial to foreground how collective mobilization (...) among excluded groups has focused on contingencies that embed a system of domination. Dr. Bhimrao Ambedkar’s critique of caste-based domination in India is noteworthy in this regard; he foregrounds how the distinction between “Touchables” and “Untouchables” in the caste system is both embedded and contingent. Focusing on untouchability in India, Ambedkar offers insights into hegemonic analyses of social exclusion, human rights articulations before the Universal Declaratio... (shrink)

In this article, the post-war institutional interpretation of Jacob A. Riis' photographs is measured against their nineteenth-century capacity for mass media communication. The conventions that today determine the proper meaning and origin of these celebrated photos first emerged with an exhibition held in 1947. The ensuing, and dominant, mode of interpretation is shown here to be fundamentally at odds with the conditions for image use in early mass media communication. This article examines the clash and argues for an alternative mode (...) of interpretation that is capable of accounting for the distinct production of iconic meaning afforded by the media that Riis employed. (shrink)

Ibn al-'Arabī (d. 1240) was one of the towering figures of Islamic intellectual history, and among Sufis still bears the title of al-shaykh al-akbar, or "the greatest master." Ibn al-'Arabī and Islamic Intellectual Culturetraces the history of the concept of "oneness of being" (wahdat al-wujūd) in the school of Ibn al- 'Arabī, in order to explore the relationship between mysticism and philosophy in Islamic intellectual life. It examines how the conceptual language used by early mystical writers became increasingly engaged over (...) time with the broader Islamic intellectual culture, eventually becoming integrated with the latter's common philosophical and theological vocabulary. It focuses on four successive generations of thinkers (Sadr al-Dīn al-Qūnawī, Mu'ayyad al-Dīn al-Jandī, 'Abd al-Razzāq al-Kāshānī, and Dāwūd al-Qaysarī), and examines how these "philosopher-mystics" refined and developed the ideas of Ibn al-'Arabī. Through a close analysis of texts, the book clearly traces the crystallization of an influential school of thought in Islamic history and its place in the broader intellectual culture. Offering an exploration of the development of Sufi expression and thought, this book will be a valuable resource for students and scholars of Islamic thought, philosophy, and mysticism. (shrink)

The paper elaborates two points: i) There is no principal opposition between predicate logic and adherence to subject-predicate form, ii) Aristotle's treatment of quantifiers fits well into a modern study of generalized quantifiers.

In this paper I reflect critically on the concept of pragmatism as it is used in Ottoman historiography. Pragmatism has gained increasing currency over the last ten to fifteen years as one of the defining features of the Ottoman polity. I argue that unless it is properly defined from a theoretical-philosophical perspective, and carefully contextualized from a historical perspective, pragmatism cannot be used as an explanatory or comparative category. When used as a framework of explanation for historical change, pragmatism blurs (...) more than it clarifies an essential aspect of the Ottoman polity that it seeks to define, namely, the political. It is essential to reflect on the difference between the political and politics because whereas the political refers to the configuration of the power relations that organize a society as a legitimate entity, politics refers to the strategies, practices, institutions, or discourses whose purpose is to construct and retain hegemony within a polity. Through an analysis of the concept of pragmatism in Ottoman historiography, I show that for most proponents of Ottoman pragmatism, pragmatism pertains to politics rather than to the political. From a perspective rigorously confined to political theory, I argue that much like the discourse of modern tolerance, pragmatism in Ottoman historiography posits a problematic periodization, relegates the political to the background, and depoliticizes essential power relations. (shrink)

In terms of Arabic philology, the concept of reason performs the function of bonding and is a key to terms such as wisdom, goodness, duty, and autonomy. By using the reason in its proper place, morality that regulates the self (nafs) emerges. The reason, which is seen as the source of spiritual values, has given human beings the quality of being the subject of trust (amana). In Islamic Wisdom, human beings are distinguished from animals by the characteristics of carrying the (...) Trust and having morality. Morality is not a factual but a spiritual value produced by the self. Thus, having reason also requires being moral. Reason, which is related to both matter and meaning, must move in parallel like a clock with morality, which is related to ideas and deeds. The unity of reason and morality is like the two boat oars that must be pulled in order to navigate the boat at the sea. The disruption of this balance leads to the disruption of the order. Islamic wisdom emphasizes that when this dual plane is well established, order and dynamism arise, and when it is disrupted, chaos and stagnation occur. In this paper, the unity of reason and morality relationship in Islamic wisdom is discussed. (shrink)

Peter Abelard's autobiography, the Historia calamitatum, is one of the best-known medieval texts, especially because of the story of his love for Heloise which it recounts. In recent decades, there was so much controversy about the authenticity of the documents concerning Abelard and Heloise that the critical interpretation of the texts was relegated to the sidelines. The present volume provides a way out of this impasse. In it, the famous text is subjected to a series of exemplary analyses from the (...) perspectives of seven different 20th century literary theories (aesthetics of reception, Foucault, Gender Studies, Rhetorical Stylistic Analysis, Psychology of Literature, Cultural Studies, Deconstruction). The analyses are preceded by the Latin text of the Historia calamitatum with a modern German translation. This is thus the first time that the Historia calamitatum has been presented in a bilingual edition. (shrink)

It is not unreasonable to think that the dispute between classical and intuitionistic mathematics might be unresolvable or 'faultless', in the sense of there being no objective way to settle it. If so, we would have a pretty case of relativism. In this note I argue, however, that there is in fact not even disagreement in any interesting sense, let alone a faultless one, in spite of appearances and claims to the contrary. A position I call classical pluralism is sketched, (...) intended to provide a coherent methodological stance towards the issue. Some reasons to recommend this stance are given, as well as some speculations as to why not everyone might want to follow the recommendation. (shrink)

Cantor’s first set theory paper (1874) establishes the uncountability of ${\mathbb R}$. We study this most basic mathematical fact formulated in the language of higher-order arithmetic. In particular, we investigate the logical and computational properties of ${\mathsf {NIN}}$ (resp. ${\mathsf {NBI}}$ ), i.e., the third-order statement there is no injection resp. bijection from $[0,1]$ to ${\mathbb N}$. Working in Kohlenbach’s higher-order Reverse Mathematics, we show that ${\mathsf {NIN}}$ and ${\mathsf {NBI}}$ are hard to prove in terms of (conventional) comprehension axioms, (...) while many basic theorems, like Arzelà’s convergence theorem for the Riemann integral (1885), are shown to imply ${\mathsf {NIN}}$ and/or ${\mathsf {NBI}}$. Working in Kleene’s higher-order computability theory based on S1–S9, we show that the following fourth-order process based on ${\mathsf {NIN}}$ is similarly hard to compute: for a given $[0,1]\rightarrow {\mathbb N}$ -function, find reals in the unit interval that map to the same natural number. (shrink)