The Greeks attributed to Thales a great many discoveries and achievements. Few, if any, of these can be said to rest on thoroughly reliable testimony, most of them being the ascriptions of commentators and compilers who lived anything from 700 to 1,000 years after his death—a period of time equivalent to that between William the Conqueror and the present day. Inevitably there ilso accumulated round the name of Thales, as round that of Pythagoras , a number of anecdotes of varying (...) degrees of plausibility and of no historical worth whatsoever. These and the achievements credited to Thales have, of course, been painstakingly brought together by Hermann Diels in Der Fragmente der Vorsokratiker. Useful and necessary as this work undoubtedly is, it nevertheless has probably contributed as much as any other book to the exaggerated and false Aew of Thales which we meet in so many modern histories of science or philosophy, and which it is the purpose of this article to combat. (shrink)

The climata played an important role in Greek geography. As used in the mathematical geography of Hipparchus and Ptolemy the word denotes a narrow belt or strip of land, 400 stades wide, on each side of a parallel of latitude; inhabitants of the same clitma were assumed to be situated in the same geographical latitude, since, for practical purposes, the celestial phenomena, lengths of the longest and shortest days, and general climatic conditions did not change appreciably within this distance. We (...) may compare the modern conception of arbitrary zones each possessing its own standard time; but whereas these are belts of longitude contiguous to each other, the climata were belts of latitude not necessarily contiguous. (shrink)

The paper „F. W. Bessel and Russian science by K. K. Lavrinovich published in NTM-Schriftenreihe contains several errors coming mainly from re-translations of German names and texts from Russian into German. The correct spelling of names and original texts are given here. Beside this, some additional information from sources not mentioned by the author is presented, and the kind of relationship between Bessel and W. Struve is discussed on the basis of their correspondence.

In a recent paper I discussed the origin of the concept of the climata in Greek geography, and adduced reasons for attributing the formulation and elaboration of the concept to Hipparchus . The above passage in Strabo was naturally mentioned in the course of the argument, and I drew attention in a footnote to the unsatisfactory nature of the account given by him of the climata. I now propose to examine the passage in more detail.

An atom is confined to a box in its ground state. An attempt is made to observe it in the left half of the box by scattering photons out of a photon wave packet passing through this half of the box. If no photons are scattered, the atom is missing. It is located on the right side of the box and its wave function is changed. The expectation value of the combined atom and photon energy is increased. For the other (...) alternative, that the atom is found on the left side, the expectation value is decreased. By including both alternatives, it is shown that the mean energy is conserved. (shrink)

Strengthening the abilities of smallholder farmers in developing countries, particularly women farmers, to produce for both home and the market is currently a development priority. In many contexts, ownership of assets is strongly gendered, reflecting existing gender norms and limiting women’s ability to invest in more profitable livelihood strategies such as market-oriented agriculture. Yet the intersection between women’s asset endowments and their ability to participate in and benefit from agricultural interventions receives minimal attention. This paper explores changes in gender relations (...) and women’s assets in four agricultural interventions that promoted high value agriculture with different degrees of market-orientation. Findings suggest that these dairy and horticulture projects can successfully involve women and increase production, income and the stock of household assets. In some cases, women were able to increase their control over production, income and assets; however in most cases men’s incomes increased more than women’s and the gender-asset gap did not decrease. Gender- and asset-based barriers to participation in projects as well as gender norms that limit women’s ability to accumulate and retain control over assets both contributed to the results. Comparing experiences across the four projects, especially where projects implemented adaptive measures to encourage gender-equitable outcomes, provides lessons for gender-responsive projects targeting existing and emerging value chains for high value products. Other targeted support to women farmers may also be needed to promote their acquisition of the physical assets required to expand production or enter other nodes of the value chain. (shrink)

The modal completeness proofs of Guaspari and Solovay (1979) for their systems R and R – are improved and the relationship between R and R – is clarified.

The old duality that eventually came to produce the mind/body-problem indicates the problem of transcendental subjectivity. The enduring significance of this problem shows itself in a provocation of any paradigm that has become too objectivistic, too naturalistic – even too idealistic in a certain sense – and too forgetful of its own departure from a perspective always presumed. Analytic philosophy bears a tendency towards such a ‘view from nowhere’ which denies a fundamental subjective connection. The rebuttal of this position entails (...) accepting the interrelation between first- and third-person-perspective; we call this the ‘view from somewhere’. Tracing the tension between the subjective and the objective we find this “view” embraced in the phenomenological tradition. At the same time we find the mind/body-problem seemingly dissolved through, among other key concepts, the introduction of the ‘lived body’. We will see, however, that this is no thorough solution; a fundamental mind/world polarity escapes the phenomenological framework and ends up mounting a critical threat to its own stability. A demonstration is attempted of how both the process of objectification and the process of subjectification falls into regressive patterns. This is due to the interplay of the gaze and the source, the ‘from’ and the ‘towards’: Ajin. Later this argumentation calls for a discussion of the pre-reflective sphere of consciousness. Finally we show the alignment between conclusions driven forth in our own dialectic and the ones found in the philosophy of Nāgārjuna. The transcendental interconstitution of subjectivity and objectivity, perspective and world, has a name in emptiness. (shrink)

We advocate an analysis of meaning that departs from the pragmatic slogan that “meaning is use”. However, in order to avoid common missteps, this claim is in dire need of qualification. We argue that linguistic meaning does not originate from language use as such; therefore we cannot base a theory of meaning only on use. It is important not to neglect the fact that language is ultimately reliant on non-linguistic factors. This might seem to oppose the aforementioned slogan, but it (...) will be made clear how this opposition is chimerical. We propose that meaning traces back to the relation between subjectivity and intersubjectivity, which is at the heart of the matter by inducing strong interdependency between intention and interpretation. But to base a full-fledged analysis of meaning in communicative dyads alone is also insufficient. What needs to be further acknowledged is that meaning sharing becomes regulated by the interactions of a community. This we call consensus and it is at play in framing all communicative acts. Hence arises a triadic structure – we call this the meaningsharing network. The main motivation behind this model is to capture that meaning is not “in the head”, nor is it autonomous of the individual members that constitute it. (shrink)

A plural referring expression (‘the Fs’ or ‘Tom, Dick and Harriet’) may be used to refer either distributively, saying something which applies to each of the Fs individually, or collectively, to the Fs taken as a single totality. Predicate Logic has to analyse both uses in terms of singular reference, treating them quite differently in so doing; but we think of such an expression as functioning in basically the same way in both kinds of use. This understanding can be (...) vindicated if we recognise that what a plural referring expression picks out is not either an aggregate simpliciter or a set, but a plurality– an aggregate taken relative to a principle for individuating its constituents; this admits of being seen either as many things or as one. In any given case, it is the nature of what is being said about the plurality which tells us whether the reference to it is to be taken as distributive, collective, or a combination of the two. Talk about pluralities is extensional. Augmenting Predicate Logic to accommodate the distinctive inference‐pattern associated with distributive plural reference is simple – and arguably necessary, to cope with cases in which distributive and collective reference are essentially combined (e.g., attributions of concerted action). (shrink)

A main issue in Swedish school debate is the question of how to teach the student a common value system based on democracy and western humanism. The debate is rather intense, to say the least. Not only is the premise that there exists one value system that we share a target for critique, but there is also the question of what value education is or could be. There is, as well, quite a body of research on children's moral development, where (...) many take as their departure the work of Kohlberg. However, there has been little or no attention on how the individual learner conceptualizes and makes meaning out of ethical issues. That is, descriptions of processes. In this paper we will present what we take to be urgent questions that need to be investigated against the background of prior research and practical work at Södra teatern in Stockholm, Sweden. For eight years in a row, Södra teatern has had as a main project to lead a practice on the subject of philosophy with children. Several groups of youths in the age of nine to eighteen have regularly met to discuss philosophical thoughts and problems, which in a democratic manner are settled for discussion by the participants. Today this philosophical practice has spread to the north of Sweden. In Backman's final exam within the teacher education she has explored the development of children's (7‐8 years old) ability to argue for different ethical positions, both verbally and in writing and painting. This practice has been inspired by the tradition at Södra teatern, but customized to fit a regular school class in Luleå, with very little experience of philosophical discussion. In the very short period of five weeks Backman has been able to see quite significant changes in the children's ability to argue for their ethical positions. The study was initiated by examining some argumentative abilities of the pupils, for instance the ability of expressing an argument for an ethical position in writing. In the final part of the study, the same ability was examined in very similar circumstances, and the augment of expressed arguments in writing was significant. Another consideration that was raised as a consequence of the study regards the pupil's conceptualizing of ethical issues. In some conversations about the notion of justice it became clear that children interpreted the term very differently. This is not very surprising but important to pay further attention to. As mentioned earlier, there has been very little attention on how individual children conceptualize ethical issues. In this paper we argue that more interest should be put on investigating these issues in more depth, and we will do this by an outlining of a research application. (shrink)

Modernity is founded on the belief that the world we build is a human invention, not a part of nature. The ecological consequences of this idea have been catastrophic. We have laid waste to natural ecosystems, replacing them with fundamentally unsustainable human designs. With time running out to address the environmental crises we have caused, our best path forward is to turn to nature for guidance. In this book, Henry Dicks explores the philosophical significance of a revolutionary approach to sustainable (...) innovation: biomimicry. The term describes the application and adaptation of strategies found in nature to the development of artificial products and systems, such as passive cooling techniques modeled on termite mounds or solar cells modeled on leaves. Dicks argues that biomimicry, typically seen as just a design strategy, can also serve as the basis for a new environmental philosophy that radically alters how we understand and relate to the natural world. By showing how we can imitate, emulate, and learn from nature, biomimicry points us toward a genuinely sustainable way of inhabiting the earth. Rooted in philosophy, The Biomimicry Revolution has profound implications spanning the natural sciences, design, architecture, sustainability studies, science and technology studies, and the environmental humanities. It presents a sweeping reconception of what philosophy can be and offers a powerful new vision of terrestrial existence. (shrink)

The philosophy of biomimicry, I argue, consists of four main areas of inquiry. The first, which has already been explored by Freya Mathews, concerns the “deep” question of what Nature ultimately is. The second, third, and fourth areas correspond to the three basic principles of biomimicry as laid out by Janine Benyus. “Nature as model” is the poetic principle of biomimicry, for it tells us how it is that things are to be “brought forth”. “Nature as measure” is the ethical (...) principle of biomimicry, for it tells us that Nature places ethical limits or standards on what it is possible for us to accomplish. And “Nature as mentor” is the epistemological principle of biomimicry, for it affirms that Nature is the ultimate source of truth, wisdom, and freedom from error. Within this overall framework, I argue that seeing Nature as physis—understood as “self-production” or “self-placing-into-the-open”—constitutes the requisite ground for the poetic, ethical, and epistemological principles of biomimicry, and that biomimicry thus conceived involves a new philosophical paradigm, which I call “enlightened naturalism”. (shrink)

Carl Knight argues that lexical sufficientarianism, which holds that sufficientarian concerns should have lexical priority over other distributive goals, is ‘excessive’ in many distinct ways and that sufficientarians should either defend weighted sufficientarianism or become prioritarians. In this article, I distinguish three types of weighted sufficientarianism and propose a weighted sufficientarian view that meets the excessiveness objection and is preferable to both Knight’s proposal and prioritarianism. More specifically, I defend a multi-threshold view which gives weighted priority to benefits directly above (...) and below its thresholds, but gives benefits below the lowest threshold lexical priority over benefits above the highest threshold. (shrink)

Despite the prominence of thresholds in theories of distributive justice, there is no general account of what sort of role is played by the idea of a threshold within such theories. This has allowed an ongoing lack of clarity and misunderstanding around views that employ thresholds. In this article, I develop an account of the concept of thresholds in distributive justice. I argue that this concept contains three elements, which threshold views deploy when ranking possible distributions. These elements are (i) (...) the level of the threshold, (ii) what constitutes the value of the threshold, and (iii) how benefits above and below the threshold must be allocated. I highlight three contributions that this particular account of thresholds makes: it clarifies the nature of the shift that occurs at the threshold; it resolves a common misunderstanding about headcount principles; and it shows how the arbitrariness objection can be met. (shrink)

While the contemporary biomimicry movement is associated primarily with the idea of taking Nature as model for technological innovation, it also contains a normative or ethical principle—Nature as measure—that may be treated in relative isolation from the better known principle of Nature as model. Drawing on discussions of the principle of Nature as measure put forward by Benyus and Jackson, while at the same time situating these discussions in relation to contemporary debates in the philosophy of biomimicry : 364–387, 2011; (...) Dicks in Philos Technol, doi: 10.1007/s13347-015-0210-2, 2015; Blok and Gremmen in J Agric Environ Ethics 29:203–217, 2016), the aim of this paper is to explore the relation between the principle of Nature as measure and environmental ethics. This leads to the argument that mainstream formulations of environmental ethics share the common trait of seeing our ethical relation to Nature as primarily involving duties to protect, preserve, or conserve various values in Nature, and that, in doing so, they problematically either overlook or dismiss as anthropocentric the possibility that Nature may provide measures, understood in terms of ecological standards, against which our own practices, or at least some of them, may be judged—a way of thinking I call “biomimetic ethics”. The practical consequences of this argument are significant. Whereas mainstream environmental ethics has been applied above all to such issues as wilderness preservation, natural resource management, and animal rights and welfare, biomimetic ethics is applicable rather to the question of how we produce, use, and consume things, and, as such, may potentially provide the basic ethical framework required to underpin the transition to a circular, bio-based, solar economy. (shrink)

In this article, I propose a novel characterization of sufficientarianism. I argue that sufficientarianism combines three claims: a priority claim that we have non-instrumental reasons to prioritize benefits in certain ranges over benefits in other ranges; a continuum claim that at least two of those ranges are on one continuum; and a deficiency claim that the lower a range on a continuum, the more priority benefits in that range have. This characterization of sufficientarianism sheds new light on two long-standing philosophical (...) debates, namely about the distinctiveness of sufficientarianism as a distributive principle and about the common objections to sufficientarianism. (shrink)

Background: Ethics rounds are one way to support healthcare personnel in handling ethically difficult situations. A previous study in the present project showed that ethics rounds did not result in significant changes in perceptions of how ethical issues were handled, that is, in the ethical climate. However, there was anecdotal evidence that the ethics rounds were viewed as a positive experience and that they stimulated ethical reflection. Aim: The aim of this study was to gain a deeper understanding of how (...) the ethics rounds were experienced and why the intervention in the form of ethics rounds did not succeed in improving the ethical climate for the staff. Research design: An exploratory and descriptive design with a qualitative approach was adopted, using individual interviews. Participants and research context: A total of 11 healthcare personnel, working in two different psychiatry outpatient clinics and with experience of participating in ethics rounds, were interviewed. Ethical considerations: The study was based on informed consent and was approved by one of the Swedish Regional Ethical Review Boards. Findings: The participants were generally positive about the ethics rounds. They had experienced changes by participating in the ethics rounds in the form of being able to see things from different perspectives as well as by gaining insight into ethical issues. However, these changes had not affected daily work. Discussion: A crucial question is whether or not increased reflection ability among the participants is a good enough outcome of ethics rounds and whether this result could have been measured in patient-related outcomes. Ethics rounds might foster cooperation among the staff and this, in turn, could influence patient care. Conclusion: By listening to others during ethics rounds, a person can learn to see things from a new angle. Participation in ethics rounds can also lead to better insight concerning ethical issues. (shrink)

It is shown that for arithmetical interpretations that may include free variables it is not the Guaspari-Solovay system R that is arithmetically complete, but their system R –. This result is then applied to obtain the nonvalidity of some rules under arithmetical interpretations including free variables, and to show that some principles concerning Rosser orderings with free variables cannot be decided, even if one restricts oneself to usual proof predicates.

In The March of Unreason, Dick Taverne expresses his concern that irrationality is on the rise in Western society, and argues that public opinion is increasingly dominated by unreflecting prejudice and an unwillingness to engage with factual evidence. Discussing topics such as genetically modified crops and foods, organic farming, the MMR vaccine, environmentalism, the precautionary principle, and the new anti-capitalist and anti-globalization movements, he argues that the rejection of the evidence-based approach nurtures a culture of suspicion, distrust, and cynicism, (...) and leads to dogmatic assertion and intolerance. Science, with all the benefits it brings, is an essential part of a civilized and democratic society: it offers the most hopeful future for humankind. (shrink)

One of the new ways used by companies to demonstrate their social responsibility is to encourage employee volunteering, whereby employees engage in socially beneficial activities on company time, while being paid by the company. The reasoning is that it is good for employee motivation (internal effects) and good for the company reputation (external effects). This article reports an empirical investigation of the internal effects of employee volunteering conducted amongst employees of the Dutch ABN-AMRO bank. The study showed that (a) socio-demographic (...) characteristics from employee volunteers markedly differ from those of non-volunteers and community volunteers and (b) employee volunteering seems to have positive effects on attitudes and behavior towards the organization. (shrink)

Semiotic objections to markets urge us not to place a good on the market because of the message that doing so would send. Brennan and Jaworski reject them on the grounds that either the contingent semiotics of a market can be changed or the weakness of semiotic reasons allows them to be ignored. The scope of their argument neglects the impure semiotic objections that claim that the message a market sends causes, constitutes, or involves a nonsemiotic wrong. These are the (...) most compelling class of semiotic objections and are the kind actually advanced in the literature. Rather than focusing on the necessity or contingency of a market's semiotics, we should instead attend to a semiotic objection's most important feature: its purity or impurity. (shrink)

In this rethinking of Marxism and its blind spots, Dick Howard argues that the collapse of European communism in 1989 should not be identified with a victory for capitalism and makes possible a wholesale reevaluation of democratic politics in the U.S. and abroad. The author turns to the American and French Revolutions to uncover what was truly "revolutionary" about those events, arguing that two distinct styles of democratic life emerged, the implications of which were misinterpreted in light of the (...) rise of communism. Howard uses a critical rereading of Marx as a theorist of democracy to offer his audience a new way to think about this political ideal. He argues that it is democracy, rather than Marxism, that is radical and revolutionary, and that Marx could have seen this but did not. In Part I, Howard explores the attraction Marxism held for intellectuals, particularly French intellectuals, and he demonstrates how the critique of totalitarianism from a Marxist viewpoint allowed these intellectuals to see the radical nature of democracy. Part II examines two hundred years of democratic political life--comparing America's experience as a democracy to that of France. Part III offers a rethinking of Marx's contribution to democratic politics. Howard concludes that Marx was attempting a "philosophy by other means," and that paradoxically, just because he was such an astute philosopher, Marx was unable to see the radical political implications of his own analyses. The philosophically justified "revolution" turns out to be the basis of an anti-politics whose end was foreshadowed by the fall of European communism in 1989. (shrink)