Eric Hedin was enjoying a productive career as a physics professor at Ball State University when the letter from a militant atheist arrived and all hell broke loose. The conflict spilled first onto the pages of the local newspaper, and then into the national news. The atheist attack included threats from the Freedom from Religion Foundation, which targeted Hedin after learning his Boundaries of Science course exposed students to an evidence-based case for design and purpose in cosmology, physics, (...) and biochemistry. Canceled Science tells the dramatic story of the atheist campaign to cancel Hedin's course, reveals the evidence the atheists tried to bury, and explores discoveries that have revolutionized our understanding of the nature and origin of matter, space, and even time itself. (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.

The category of heroic action is important in both everyday life and the wider social context. This article argues that interest in the notion of heroic actions and heroic defeats also brings out an important set of sociological problems, such as disagreements on identity, norms, and rational choice explanations. Illustrations are provided from recent analyses of union militancy in Britain and Italy, and of the student movement in Beijing. Different versions of the critique of rational choice theory often take norm-guided (...) action as a point of departure. Another version of this critique is represented by theories of new social movements and identity maintenance. The article suggests that rational choice theory is more useful than some of its opponents would have it; yet the general argument favors a mixed motivation approach. The discussion points out some of the strengths and limitations of different explanatory perspectives, and some of the links between them. (shrink)

According to a main idea of Gentzen the meanings of the logical constants are reflected by the introduction rules in his system of natural deduction. This idea is here understood as saying roughly that a closed argument ending with an introduction is valid provided that its immediate subarguments are valid and that other closed arguments are justified to the extent that they can be brought to introduction form. One main part of the paper is devoted to the exact development of (...) this notion. Another main part of the paper is concerned with a modification of this notion as it occurs in Michael Dummett’s book The Logical Basis of Metaphysics. The two notions are compared and there is a discussion of how they fare as a foundation for a theory of meaning. It is noted that Dummett’s notion has a simpler structure, but it is argued that it is less appropriate for the foundation of a theory of meaning, because the possession of a valid argument for a sentence in Dummett’s sense is not enough to be warranted to assert the sentence. (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)

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)

I attempt an explication of what it means for an operation across domains to be the same on all domains, an issue that ) took to be central for a successful delimitation of the logical operations. Some properties that seem strongly related to sameness are examined, notably isomorphism invariance, and sameness under extensions of the domain. The conclusion is that although no precise criterion can satisfy all intuitions about sameness, combining the two properties just mentioned yields a reasonably robust and (...) useful explication of sameness across domains. (shrink)

We show that to every recursive total continuous functional $\Phi$ there is a PCF-definable representative $\Psi$ of $\Phi$ in the hierarchy of partial continuous functionals, where PCF is Plotkin's programming language for computable functionals. PCF-definable is equivalent to Kleene's S1-S9-computable over the partial continuous functionals.

This article examines the metaphysical and moral foundations of Spinoza’s account of suicide. Spinoza’s treatment of suicide is brought into question by his conatus doctrine, which posits the striving to preserve one’s own being as the very essence of existence. Accordingly, suicide, or the termination of life, as the destruction of one’s own being, represents the exhaustion of this striving. The analysis of the causes that lead to self-destruction has sparked significant debate in Spinoza’s literature, raising the question of whether (...) suicide is a passive and irrational decision or a free and rational choice. This article, which engages with prominent scholars of this literature, notably Matson, Bennett, LeBuffe and Nadler, aims to alleviate this controversy by offering alternative readings and arguments. It concludes that free and rational suicide does not exist in Spinoza’s thought; instead, the “suicide of reason or rationality” forms the basis for bodily suicide. (shrink)

We prove that the hierarchy of hereditarily effective typestreams, that are effective models of inductivly defined types, has the length of the first recursivly inaccessible ordinal.

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)