The past decade has seen a rapid development and proliferation of sophisticated computer systems in organizations. Designers, however, have minimized the importance of security control systems, (except for those systems where data security and access control have obviously been of major importance). The result is an increasing recognition that computer systems security is often easily compromised.This research will provide the initial step in assessing ways in which attorneys retained to prosecute computer crimes and computer people who discover these violations can (...) work together to strengthen both our computer systems to thwart violators and the laws that are currently on the books that can be used to prosecute violators. (shrink)

Technology has made it easier and cheaper for human resource managers to gather and maintain an infinite amount of data about present and prospective employees. An essential component in the success of managing this data is the Human Resource Information System (HRIS), a database of personal information about each employee. Because of the power to access and use this data, HR managers must be aware of the ethical and legal issues associated with both the creation and use of those data (...) in the HRIS. (shrink)

Archaea are microorganisms that are distinct from bacteria and eukaryotes. They are prevalent in extreme environments, and yet found in most ecosystems. They are a natural component of the microbiota of most, if not all, humans and other animals. Despite their ubiquity and close association with humans, animals and plants, no pathogenic archaea have been identified. Because no archaeal pathogens have yet been identified, there is a general assumption that archaeal pathogens do not exist. This review examines whether this is (...) a good assumption by investigating the potential for archaea to be or become pathogens. This is achieved by addressing: the diversity of archaea versus known pathogens, opportunities for archaea to demonstrate pathogenicity and be detected as pathogens, reports linking archaea with disease, and immune responses to archaea. In addition, molecular and genomic data are examined for the presence of systems utilised in pathogenesis. The view of this report is that, although archaea can presently be described as non‐pathogenic, they have the potential to be (discovered as) pathogens. The present optimistic view that there are no archaeal pathogens is tainted by a severe lack of relevant knowledge, which may have important consequences in the future. BioEssays 25:1119–1128, 2003. © 2003 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

This essay reconsiders the haphazard arrangement of Donne's first printed collection of poems in relation to an elegy written for Donne by one Thomas Browne, published for the first and only time in that same volume. The earliest recorded response we have to Donne's verse considered as a complete body of work, Browne's elegy thematizes the readerly tendency to interpret this textual body in the light of "subjective" notions of "proper" desire. Through a close reading of Browne's poem, in (...) which I contextualize his key image of the bad reader as a "circumciser" within the theological and medical discourses of the period, I argue that Browne's response to Donne's text is at once instructively prescient -- providing a useful allegory of reading for the contemporary critic -- and also helpful in situating Donne at the cusp of a historical transformation between "medieval" and "early modern" conceptions of the sexual and the spiritual.IThe structural organization of John Donne's first printed book of poetry makes no obvious sense. Published posthumously in 1633, the collection eschews even the basic generic distinctions so familiar to Donne's modern audience: "Songs and Sonnets," "Satires," "Verse Letters," and "Divine Poems" . Several readers over the years have commented upon the disorderly configuration of Donne's 1633 text; and most recently, Leah Marcus has provided a detailed analysis of the collection in Unediting The Renaissance, itself an ambitious attempt to combine the traditional skills of textual bibliography with the insights of poststructuralist theory. Among other things, Marcus asserts that the very layout and internal composition of Donne's first collection constitute graphic evidence for the ultimate impossibility of "fixing" him within any reductively binary scheme. Indeed, for Marcus, the version of Donne projected by the 1633 Poems confirms not only her deconstructivist principles but also her aesthetic taste more generally. In her words, the collection is a striking melange of sacred and secular that refuses to separate John Donne from Jack. Verse epistles . . . jostle up against scurrilous amatory verses and evocations of human decay in a rough gallimaufry of mingled passions that projects a John Donne very like the Donne most of us value, a Donne for whom the sacred and secular are so closely entwined as to be inseparable.This reading would probably not be considered controversial in most quarters, and I too am in agreement with the main points of Marcus's argument, insofar as they go. However, I want to pause for a moment over one of the more undeveloped aspects of Marcus's interpretation, encoded in her use of the phrase "most of us." As the context makes clear, by "most of us" Marcus means a rather small band of nonreligious or liberal, professionalized, twentieth-century readers. Of course, Marcus is perfectly justified in assuming that her audience will be drawn from exactly this narrow demographic , but at the same time it must also be admitted that "most of us" therefore only refers to the tiniest portion of Donne's actual historical readership. Given that Marcus is performing an analysis of Donne's 1633 Poems, then, one obvious question emerges from her account: How might readers in 1633 have responded to the collection's juxtaposition of the religious with the secular? What might its disorganization have signified for them?One possible answer to this question has been suggested by Arthur F. Marotti, perhaps the most influential of Donne's textualist critics. In Manuscript, Print, and the English Renaissance Lyric, Marotti suggests, against Marcus, that Donne's first editors deliberately delay the readerly encounter with Donne's more earthly lyrics by burying them toward the back of the book. In other words, according to Marotti, the appearance of random disorganization that Marcus values is actually an intentional blind -- the result of a conscious attempt to "protect the reputation of Dean Donne from moral taint."However, this ingenious theory is not without flaws. For example, we are required to accept Marotti's contention. (shrink)

The recent debates concerning divine action in the context of quantum mechanics are examined with particular reference to the work of William Pollard, Robert J. Russell, Thomas Tracy, Nancey Murphy, and Keith Ward. The concept of a quantum mechanical “event” is elucidated and shown to be at the center of this debate. An attempt is made to clarify the claims made by the protagonists of quantum mechanical divine action by considering the measurement process of quantum mechanics in detail. Four (...) possibilities for divine influence on quantum mechanics are identified and the theological and scientific implications of each discussed. The conclusion reached is that quantum mechanics is not easily reconciled with the doctrine of divine action. (shrink)

(No abstract is available for this citation).

B.Saunders and J. van Brakel (eds.), Theories, Technologies, Instrumentalities of Colour, University Press of America 2002, 169-188.

Recent articles by Nicholas Saunders, Carl Helrich, and Jeffrey Koperski raise important questions about attempts to make use of quantum mechanics in giving an account of particular divine action in the world. In response, I make two principal points. First, some of the most pointed theological criticisms lose their force if we attend with sufficient care to the limited aims of proposals about divine action at points of quantum indetermination. Second, given the current state of knowledge, it remains an (...) open option to make theological use of an indeterministic interpretation of quantum mechanics. Any such proposal, however, will be an exploratory hypothesis offered in the face of deep uncertainties regarding the measurement problem and the presence in natural systems of amplifiers for quantum effects. (shrink)

The University of Greenwich Generator is setting sail on a thrilling new journey of knowledge exchange with the launch of its first-ever podcast the Navigator. Crafted in collaboration with Lucien von Schomberg, Senior Lecturer in Creativity and Innovation at Greenwich Business School it promises to be an exciting platform for innovation, entrepreneurship, and thought-provoking conversation. The podcast aims to bridge the gap between academic insights and real-world issues in an easily digestible way. Through engaging conversations, listeners can expect to gain (...) valuable knowledge from industry leaders and academic experts alike. Operating on three key principles—knowledge communication, knowledge exchange, and knowledge creation—this podcast embodies the essence of the Generator's mission, inspiring, educating and fostering collaboration. The first episode explores the limitless potential of AI in today's world, unravelling its impact on business, education, and society. Guests share their profound insights, experiences, and practical advice, shedding light on how AI is shaping our future. The episode delved deep into the ethical implications but also vast potential of using AI in the future and how it will affect both education and the wider world. The episode boasts an impressive lineup of inaugural guests, including Jane Harrington, the Vice-Chancellor of The University of Greenwich, Carl Thomas, Enterprise Advisor, and founder of Audiowings, Ghislaine Boddington, Professor in Digital Immersion, and Neil Saunders, Senior Lecturer in Mathematical Sciences. Together, these guests provide diverse perspectives on the future of AI at the university and beyond. (shrink)

The Protean Character of Mathematics SAUNDERS MAC LANE (Chicago) 1. Introduction The thesis of this paper is that mathematics is protean. ...

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Book Reviews Bibliography on Plato's "'Laws, "" 1920-1970: With Additional Citations through May, 1975. By Trevor J. Saunders. (New York: Arno Press, 1976. Pp. i + 60. $15.00) The Penguin Classics translator of the non-Socratic Laws, as Leo Strauss called them, has here compiled in a most usable way a thorough bibliography of books and articles about the Laws or parts of them. The section "Texts, Translations, and (...) Commentaries" properly excludes translations not made directly from the Greek. In previous centuries this would, also properly, have excluded many a famous or popular translation, such as Thomas Taylor's or Victor Cousin's, worked out from the text of M. Ficino's "first edition" in Latin. Given the state of the Greek text and the practice, inaugurated by Ficino, of improving upon the Greek in the translatioias, some notation about the literalness of the translations cited would have been of additional value. Section B, in thirty pages, is the largest and also deliberately the most selective in striving to limit itself to work concerned exclusively or primarily with the Laws. But it cannot avoid including much material about some aspect of Plato in general rather than about the Laws; this is especially true of the subsection, B1, on comprehensive accounts. Section B2, on the text and its tradition, has overwhelmingly more citations about the indirect tradition than about the texts themselves, an interesting indication of the current state of this question. The next subsections, to B12, divide according to subject matter. BI3 lists studies on the influence of the Laws. The last section, in twenty-four pages, is most valuable. It lists, by Stephanus page number, an abundance of discussions of individual passages from Book I through Book XII wherever these discussions, bibliographically speaking, may have occurred. Students of the Laws will be well served by, and most grateful to, Professor Saunders for this bibliography. I can only second the intent of his parting epigraph that sends us back to the study of the Laws themselves. But I must add that more explicitly detailed work appears to be required both on the difficulties the text itself presents to students of Plato (one thinks of A. Boeckh's analyses of the prose in Books I through III) and on those which arise when the Laws is contrasted--from the point of view of design and intellectuality--with those of Plato's works that are comparable, if not in number of pages, at least in scale of conception and monumentality. V. TEJERA SUNY at Stony Brook Science and Philosophy in Aristotle's Biological Works. By Anthony Preus. (Hildesheim and New York: George Olms, 1975. Pp. ix + 404. DM.88) A reciprocal influence between Aristotle's philosophy and biology--if it could be demonstrated through step-by-step criticism and not merely asserted in generalities about functionalism--might help to explain both, and might also itself be philosophically interesting ; for it should clarify Aristotle's concepts of form, essence, universal, and species-concepts which have been mercilessly jumbled in the traditional interpretations. With the failure of Jaegerian developmental analyses, we can hardly now hope for help from detailed chronology. But a general dating of Aristotle's biological interest to the Assos-Mytilene period, when he was already aged forty, is accepted by most people (though not by Jaeger who [463] 464 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY put it at the end, nor by Ryle who put it at the beginning of Aristotle's career) and is the basis of Anthony Preus's contention in this book. For if Aristotle began serious biology only in middle life we could expect a tension between the antiphenomenal metaphysics of the Academy, which he had just left after twenty years there, and the kind of philosophizing and explaining that might seem demanded by living concrete organisms. Preus sets out to show such a tension, claiming on page 1 that "in P. A. and G. A. sometimes the philosophical position is bent to fit the observed facts, and sometimes the observations are adjusted to fit the philosophical position." The reader may be assured at once that this appalling accusation (which is repeated in the publisher's blurb) is not... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Contradiction and Legislation Regarding the Right to LifeKevin L. Flannery, S.J.Unborn Human Life and Fundamental Rights: Leading Constitutional Cases under Scrutiny. Edited by Pilar Zambrano and William Saunders, with concluding reflections by John Finnis. Berlin: Peter Lang, 2019.The most fundamental principle of law is the principle of non-contradiction. This is Thomas Aquinas's position in the seminal article on the natural law, Summa theologiae I-II, question 94, article (...) 2, where, citing Aristotle, he formulates the principle as, "One should not simultaneously affirm and negate." Lafter in the same article, Thomas offers a practical formulation of the same principle, "Good is to be done and pursued and evil avoided"; but in law, since it is contained in propositions (airmations and negations) as distinct from ideas regarding the pursuit of goods, the prior formulation is the more immediately relevant of the two.The book under review is important in that, by going through the legal history regarding abortion and related issues in a number of different countries—the United States, Canada, Italy, Spain, Poland, Ireland (Eire), Costa Rica, Argentina, Chile, Mexico, and Peru—it causes to emerge any number of times the realization that legislation and judicial decisions in favor of abortion "rights" invariably infect a legal system with contradictions and inconsistencies of various sorts. The present essay is, therefore, not your typical book review. Its objective is simply to list some of the legal contradictions and inconsistencies identified by the book's various authors as they describe the legal status of the unborn in their respective nations. [End Page 1323]William Saunders's very clear and comprehensive first chapter is entitled, "Judicial Interference in the Protection of Human Life in the United States: Actions and Consequences." In it, he describes, among other things, the Human Cloning Prohibition Act passed by the U.S. House of Representatives in 2003, which prohibited "any person or entity, public or private" from performing human cloning (23). He speaks also of a bill proposed in the U.S. Senate once the Human Cloning Prohibition Act had passed in the House of Representatives. This Senate bill (which was entitle, "The Human Cloning Ban and Stem Cell Research Protection Act") would have prohibited "any person or other legal entity" from conducting human cloning, even while allowing nuclear transplantation, which it defines as "transferring the nucleus of a human somatic cell into an oocyte from which the nucleus... ha[s] been... removed or rendered inert." The problem here, as Saunders explains, is that this latter definition "is the very definition of cloning" (25). In other words, in the same year, two pieces of legislation were considered in the Congress of the United States, both purporting to ban human cloning, one of which would have permitted what the other described (correctly) as human cloning and so prohibited.In the second chapter, "Whither United States Abortion Law?" by Gerard V. Bradley, discussed, among other things, is the inconsistency between the United States Supreme Court's pro-abortion decision Roe v. Wade and various laws, both state and federal, prohibiting feticide. Bradley says of the 2004 federal Unborn Victims of Violence Act that, "in pertinent part it says that 'whoever' 'causes the death of or bodily injury to,' a 'child who is in utero' is guilty of an offense apart from any accompanying offense against the woman carrying the child." The penalty for such an act is the same as would be imposed if the act were inflicted upon the unborn child's mother: if, for instance, the mother was killed. "A child in utero," reports Bradley, "is defined as a member of the species homo sapiens, at any stage of development, who is carried in the womb'" (37).The problem here is that prosecutable under this law are acts identical with those performed legally by abortionists. Bradley mentions two cases in which a woman's male partner—in one case the woman's husband—effected by stealth the abortion of her child. In one case, the male purchased abortion pills and affixed to their container a pharmacy label indicating that it contained a common antibiotic; in the other, the husband obtained the same type of... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Book Reviews Bibliography on Plato's "'Laws, "" 1920-1970: With Additional Citations through May, 1975. By Trevor J. Saunders. (New York: Arno Press, 1976. Pp. i + 60. $15.00) The Penguin Classics translator of the non-Socratic Laws, as Leo Strauss called them, has here compiled in a most usable way a thorough bibliography of books and articles about the Laws or parts of them. The section "Texts, Translations, and (...) Commentaries" properly excludes translations not made directly from the Greek. In previous centuries this would, also properly, have excluded many a famous or popular translation, such as Thomas Taylor's or Victor Cousin's, worked out from the text of M. Ficino's "first edition" in Latin. Given the state of the Greek text and the practice, inaugurated by Ficino, of improving upon the Greek in the translatioias, some notation about the literalness of the translations cited would have been of additional value. Section B, in thirty pages, is the largest and also deliberately the most selective in striving to limit itself to work concerned exclusively or primarily with the Laws. But it cannot avoid including much material about some aspect of Plato in general rather than about the Laws; this is especially true of the subsection, B1, on comprehensive accounts. Section B2, on the text and its tradition, has overwhelmingly more citations about the indirect tradition than about the texts themselves, an interesting indication of the current state of this question. The next subsections, to B12, divide according to subject matter. BI3 lists studies on the influence of the Laws. The last section, in twenty-four pages, is most valuable. It lists, by Stephanus page number, an abundance of discussions of individual passages from Book I through Book XII wherever these discussions, bibliographically speaking, may have occurred. Students of the Laws will be well served by, and most grateful to, Professor Saunders for this bibliography. I can only second the intent of his parting epigraph that sends us back to the study of the Laws themselves. But I must add that more explicitly detailed work appears to be required both on the difficulties the text itself presents to students of Plato (one thinks of A. Boeckh's analyses of the prose in Books I through III) and on those which arise when the Laws is contrasted--from the point of view of design and intellectuality--with those of Plato's works that are comparable, if not in number of pages, at least in scale of conception and monumentality. V. TEJERA SUNY at Stony Brook Science and Philosophy in Aristotle's Biological Works. By Anthony Preus. (Hildesheim and New York: George Olms, 1975. Pp. ix + 404. DM.88) A reciprocal influence between Aristotle's philosophy and biology--if it could be demonstrated through step-by-step criticism and not merely asserted in generalities about functionalism--might help to explain both, and might also itself be philosophically interesting ; for it should clarify Aristotle's concepts of form, essence, universal, and species-concepts which have been mercilessly jumbled in the traditional interpretations. With the failure of Jaegerian developmental analyses, we can hardly now hope for help from detailed chronology. But a general dating of Aristotle's biological interest to the Assos-Mytilene period, when he was already aged forty, is accepted by most people (though not by Jaeger who [463]... (shrink)

A reply to a comment by Paul Tappenden (BJPS 59 (2008) pp. 307-314) on S. Saunders and D. Wallace, "Branching and Uncertainty" (BJPS 59 (2008) pp. 298-306).

Category Theory has developed rapidly. This book aims to present those ideas and methods which can now be effectively used by Mathe­ maticians working in a variety of other fields of Mathematical research. This occurs at several levels. On the first level, categories provide a convenient conceptual language, based on the notions of category, functor, natural transformation, contravariance, and functor category. These notions are presented, with appropriate examples, in Chapters I and II. Next comes the fundamental idea of an adjoint (...) pair of functors. This appears in many substantially equivalent forms: That of universal construction, that of direct and inverse limit, and that of pairs offunctors with a natural isomorphism between corresponding sets of arrows. All these forms, with their interrelations, are examined in Chapters III to V. The slogan is "Adjoint functors arise everywhere". Alternatively, the fundamental notion of category theory is that of a monoid -a set with a binary operation of multiplication which is associative and which has a unit; a category itself can be regarded as a sort of general­ ized monoid. Chapters VI and VII explore this notion and its generaliza­ tions. Its close connection to pairs of adjoint functors illuminates the ideas of universal algebra and culminates in Beck's theorem characterizing categories of algebras; on the other hand, categories with a monoidal structure lead inter alia to the study of more convenient categories of topological spaces. (shrink)

According to the Everett interpretation, branching structure and ratios of norms of branch amplitudes are the objective correlates of chance events and chances; that is, 'chance' and 'chancing', like 'red' and 'colour', pick out objective features of reality, albeit not what they seemed. Once properly identified, questions about how and in what sense chances can be observed can be treated as straightforward dynamical questions. On that basis, given the unitary dynamics of quantum theory, it follows that relative and never absolute (...) chances can be observed; that only on repetition of a large numbers of similar trials can relative probabilities be measured; and so on. The epistemology of objective chances can in this way be worked out from the dynamics. its curious features are thus explained. But one aspect of chance set-ups seems to resist this subsuming of chancing to branching: how is it that chance involves uncertainty? And if that is not possible, on Everettian lines, then the whole project is doomed. I argue that in fact there is no difficulty in making sense of uncertainty in the face of branching. Contrary to initial impressions, the unitary formalism is consistent with a well-defined notion of self-locating uncertainty. It is also consistent without: the mathematics under-determines the metaphysics in these respects. (shrink)

Particle indistinguishability has always been considered a purely quantum mechanical concept. In parallel, indistinguishable particles have been thought to be entities that are not properly speaking objects at all. I argue, to the contrary, that the concept can equally be applied to classical particles, and that in either case particles may (with certain exceptions) be counted as objects even though they are indistinguishable. The exceptions are elementary bosons (for example photons).

One way of increasing the supply of organs available for transplant would be to switch to an opt-out system of donor registration. This is typically assumed to operate on the basis of presumed consent, but this faces the objection that not all of those who fail to opt out would actually consent to the use of their cadaveric organs. This paper defuses this objection, arguing that people's actual, explicit or implicit, consent to use their organs is not needed. It borrows (...) David Estlund's notion of ‘normative consent’ from the justification of political authority and applies it to the case of organ donation. According to this idea, when it is wrong to withhold consent to something, the moral force of that lack of consent may be null and void. If it is wrong of a person to refuse to donate their cadaveric organs to others, then it may be that their actual consent is not needed. This supports an opt-out system, which provides protection for those who have genuine reasons to refuse donation, and spares the worries as to what the deceased would actually have wanted. (shrink)

According to the Everett interpretation, branching structure and ratios of norms of branch amplitudes are the objective correlates of chance events and chances; that is, 'chance' and 'chancing', like 'red' and 'colour', pick out objective features of reality, albeit not what they seemed. Once properly identified, questions about how and in what sense chances can be observed can be treated as straightforward dynamical questions. On that basis, given the unitary dynamics of quantum theory, it follows that relative and never absolute (...) chances can be observed; that only on repetition of a large numbers of similar trials can relative probabilities be measured; and so on. The epistemology of objective chances can in this way be worked out from the dynamics. its curious features are thus explained. But one aspect of chance set-ups seems to resist this subsuming of chancing to branching: how is it that chance involves uncertainty? And if that is not possible, on Everettian lines, then the whole project is doomed. I argue that in fact there is no difficulty in making sense of uncertainty in the face of branching. Contrary to initial impressions, the unitary formalism is consistent with a well-defined notion of self-locating uncertainty. It is also consistent without: the mathematics under-determines the metaphysics in these respects. (shrink)

We demonstrate that the quantum-mechanical description of composite physical systems of an arbitrary number of similar fermions in all their admissible states, mixed or pure, for all finite-dimensional Hilbert spaces, is not in conflict with Leibniz's Principle of the Identity of Indiscernibles (PII). We discern the fermions by means of physically meaningful, permutation-invariant categorical relations, i.e. relations independent of the quantum-mechanical probabilities. If, indeed, probabilistic relations are permitted as well, we argue that similar bosons can also be discerned in all (...) their admissible states; but their categorical discernibility turns out to be a state-dependent matter. In all demonstrated cases of discernibility, the fermions and the bosons are discerned (i) with only minimal assumptions on the interpretation of quantum mechanics; (ii) without appealing to metaphysical notions, such as Scotusian haecceitas, Lockean substrata, Postian transcendental individuality or Adamsian primitive thisness; and (iii) without revising the general framework of classical elementary predicate logic and standard set theory, thus without revising standard mathematics. This confutes: (a) the currently dominant view that, provided (i) and (ii), the quantum-mechanical description of such composite physical systems always conflicts with PII; and (b) that if PII can be saved at all, the only way to do it is by adopting one or other of the thick metaphysical notions mentioned above. Among the most general and influential arguments for the currently dominant view are those due to Schrodinger, Margenau, Cortes, Dalla Chiara, Di Francia, Redhead, French, Teller, Butterfield, Giuntini, Mittelstaedt, Castellani, Krause and Huggett. We review them succinctly and critically as well as related arguments by van Fraassen and Massimi. (shrink)

The problem of measurement is usually thought of as a problem of physics. Certainly the straightforward solutions modify or supplement the basic equations. One might instead conclude that theories are only instruments for coördinating observable phenomena, and perhaps that is what Bohr’s Copenhagen interpretation really comes down to. For most of us this sort of “philosophical” resolution of the problem of measurement is not acceptable.

The Everett interpretation of quantum mechanics divides naturally into two parts: first, the interpretation of the structure of the quantum state, in terms of branching, and second, the interpretation of this branching structure in terms of probability. This is the second of two reviews of the Everett interpretation, and focuses on probability. Branching processes are identified as chance processes, and the squares of branch amplitudes are chances. Since branching is emergent, physical probability is emergent as well.

Divine Action and Modern Science considers the relationship between the natural sciences and the concept of God acting in the world. Nicholas Saunders examines the Biblical motivations for asserting a continuing notion of divine action and identifies several different theological approaches to the problem. He considers their theoretical relationships with the laws of nature, indeterminism, and probabilistic causation. His book then embarks on a radical critique of current attempts to reconcile special divine action with quantum theory, chaos theory and (...) quantum chaos. As well as considering the implications of these problems for common interpretations of divine action, Saunders also surveys and codifies the many different theological, philosophical and scientific responses to divine action. The conclusion reached is that we are still far from a satisfactory account of how God might act in a manner that is consonant with modern science despite the copious recent scholarship in this area. (shrink)

The concept of indistinguishable particles in quantum theory is fundamental to questions of ontology. All ordinary matter is made of electrons, protons, neutrons, and photons and they are all indistinguishable particles. Yet the concept itself has proved elusive, in part because of the interpretational difficulties that afflict quantum theory quite generally, and in part because the concept was so central to the discovery of the quantum itself, by Planck in 1900; it came encumbered with revolution. I offer a deflationary reading (...) of the concept ‘indistinguishable’ that is identical to Gibbs’ concept ‘generic phase’, save that it is defined for state spaces with only finitely-many states of bounded volume and energy. That, and that alone, makes for the difference between the quantum and Gibbs concepts of indistinguishability. This claim is heretical on several counts, but here we consider only the content of the claim itself, and its bearing on the early history of quantum theory rather than in relation to contemporary debates about particle indistinguishability and permutation symmetry. It powerfully illuminates that history. (shrink)

The question of whether or not early Chinese philosophers had a concept of truth has been the topic of some scholarly debate over the past few decades. The present essay offers a novel assessment of the debate, and suggests that no answer is fully satisfactory, as the plausibility of each turns in no small part on difficult and unsettled philosophical issues prior to the interpretation of any ancient Chinese philosophical texts—particularly the issues of what it means to “have a concept” (...) and how we understand the concept of truth itself. This essay summarizes prominent views within the debate over truth and Chinese philosophy and offers conditional assessments of each answer with respect to contemporary theories of concepts and theories of truth. The essay concludes with an appeal to methodological and interpretive pluralism, within reasonable constraints, in discussions of this topic. (shrink)

The Politics is one of the most influential texts in the history of political thought, and it raises issues which still confront anyone who wants to think seriously about the ways in which human societies are organized and governed. The work of one of the world's greatest philosophers, it draws on Aristotle's own great knowledge of the political and constitutional affairs of the Greek cities. By examining the way societies are run - from households to city states - Aristotle establishes (...) how successful constitutions can best be initiated and upheld. For this edition Sir Ernest Barker's fine translation, which has been widely used for nearly half a century, has been extensively revised to meet the needs of the modern reader. The accessible introduction and clear notes by R F Stalley examine the historical and philosophical background of the work and discuss its significance for modern political thought. (shrink)

The Everett interpretation of quantum mechanics divides naturally into two parts: first, the interpretation of the structure of the quantum state, in terms of branching, and second, the interpretation of this branching structure in terms of probability. This is the first of two reviews of the Everett interpretation, and focuses on structure, with particular attention to the role of decoherence theory. Written in terms of the quantum histories formalism, decoherence theory just is the theory of branching structure, in Everett's sense.

The globalized nature of modern organizations presents new and intimidating challenges for effective relationship building. Organizations and their employees are increasingly being asked to manage unfamiliar relationships with unfamiliar parties. These relationships not only involve working across different national cultures, but also dealing with different organizational cultures, different professional cultures and even different internal constituencies. Managing such differences demands trust. This book brings together research findings on organizational trust-building across cultures. Established trust scholars from around the world consider the development (...) and maintenance of trust between, for example, management consultants and their clients, senior international managers from different nationalities, different internal organizational groupings during times of change, international joint ventures, and service suppliers and the local communities they serve. These studies, set in a wide variety of national settings, are an important resource for academics, students and practitioners who wish to know more about the nature of cross-cultural trust-building in organizations"--Provided by publisher. (shrink)

A variety of ideas arising in decoherence theory, and in the ongoing debate over Everett's relative-state theory, can be linked to issues in relativity theory and the philosophy of time, specifically the relational theory of tense and of identity over time. These have been systematically presented in companion papers (Saunders 1995; 1996a); in what follows we shall consider the same circle of ideas, but specifically in relation to the interpretation of probability, and its identification with relations in the Hilbert (...) Space norm. The familiar objection that Everett's approach yields probabilities different from quantum mechanics is easily dealt with. The more fundamental question is how to interpret these probabilities consistent with the relational theory of change, and the relational theory of identity over time. I shall show that the relational theory needs nothing more than the physical, minimal criterion of identity as defined by Everett's theory, and that this can be transparently interpreted in terms of the ordinary notion of the chance occurrence of an event, as witnessed in the present. It is in this sense that the theory has empirical content. (shrink)