It is a cliché of self-help advice that there are no problems, only opportunities. The rationale and actions of the BSHS in creating its Global Digital History of Science Festival may be a rare genuine confirmation of this mantra. The global COVID-19 pandemic of 2020 meant that the society's usual annual conference – like everyone else's – had to be cancelled. Once the society decided to go digital, we had a hundred days to organize and deliver our first online festival. (...) In the hope that this will help, inspire and warn colleagues around the world who are also trying to move online, we here detail the considerations, conversations and thinking behind the organizing team's decisions. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to argue states are not organizations, but rather the objective legal persons of international law. The ontological similarities and differences between states and orga...

The purpose of this article is to reexamine the ontology of geopolitical boundaries so that they can be better represented in ontologies designed for the semantic web. Previous work on this subject...

People with Down syndrome often exhibit deficiencies in wayfinding activities, particularly route learning (e.g., Courbois et al., 2013 ; Davis et al., 2014 ; Farran et al., 2015 ). Evidence concerning more sophisticated survey learning has been sparse. In the research reported here, two experiments are reported that evaluated survey learning of youth with DS and typically developing children (TD) matched on mental age. In Experiment 1, participants learned two overlapping routes consisting of three turns each through a virtual environment (...) depicting 9 square city blocks. Following acquisition, they were tested on multiple measures of survey knowledge: finding a shortcut, identifying the direction of landmarks not currently visible from their location in the environment, and recognizing a bird’s-eye representation of the overall environment. Under these conditions, which should provide relatively optimal opportunities for survey learning, the participants with DS performed comparably to TD participants matched on non-verbal ability on all of our measures of survey learning. Hence, we concluded that people with DS can acquire some survey knowledge when tasked with learning a small environment and given the opportunity to do so. In Experiment 2, the experimenter navigated participants through a large, relatively complex, virtual environment along a circuitous path, beginning and ending at a target landmark. Then, the participants were placed at a pre-specified location in the environment that they had viewed previously and instructed to navigate to the same target (a door) using the shortest possible path from their current location. They completed the task three times: once after being shown the environment one time, once after three exposures, and once after five exposures. Results indicated that the participants with DS exhibited significantly less skill at identifying the shortcut than did the TD participants, with differences emerging as the number of exposures increased. Participants with DS were also less able to recall landmarks at the end of the experiment. Overall, however, the performance of both groups was relatively poor in both experiments – with the performance of participants with DS being worse as conditions became less optimal. These results were discussed in terms of underlying mechanisms that may account for variations in survey learning as environmental complexity increases. (shrink)

Plochmann and Robinson closely analyze this great dialogue in the first two-thirds of their book, turning in the final four chapters to a broader discussion of its unity, sweep, and philosophic implications.

Virtues are acquirable, so if intellectual humility is a virtue, it’s acquirable. But there is something deeply problematic—perhaps even paradoxical—about aiming to be intellectually humble. Drawing on Edward Slingerland’s analysis of the paradoxical virtue of wu-wei in Trying Not To Try (New York: Crown, 2014), we argue for an anti-individualistic conception of the trait, concluding that one’s intellectual humility depends upon the intellectual humility of others. Slingerland defines wu-wei as the “dynamic, effortless, and unselfconscious state of mind of a (...) person who is optimally active and effective” (Trying Not to Try, 7). Someone who embodies wu-wei inspires implicit trust, so it is beneficial to appear wu-wei. This has led to an arms race between faking wu-wei on the one hand and detecting fakery on the other. Likewise, there are many benefits to being (or seeming to be) intellectually humble. But someone who makes conscious, strategic efforts to appear intellectually humble is ipso facto not intellectually humble. Following Slingerland’s lead, we argue that there are several strategies one might pursue to acquire genuine intellectual humility, and all of these involve commitment to shared social or epistemic values, combined with receptivity to feedback from others, who must in turn have and manifest relevant intellectual virtues. In other words, other people and shared values are partial bearers of a given individual’s intellectual humility. If this is on the right track, then acquiring intellectual humility demands epistemic anti-individualism. (shrink)

This book develops arithmetic without the induction principle, working in theories that are interpretable in Raphael Robinson's theory Q. Certain inductive formulas, the bounded ones, are interpretable in Q. A mathematically strong, but logically very weak, predicative arithmetic is constructed. Originally published in 1986. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while (...) presenting them in durable paperback editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905. (shrink)

Theologies of divine action in nature have sought to maximize traction with the sciences to secure their credibility. While varying in significant ways, all extant proposals share a commitment to physical realism, the claim that (at least some) physical entities and facts are both mind‐independent and ontologically basic within creation. However, I will argue that this metaphysical commitment undermines the body of scientific knowledge to which theologians wish to be responsive. Is there an alternative? Building on the work of Howard (...) Robinson, I will show that there is a coherent account of mind's place in nature that denies physical realism. Such an account would enable a theological description of God's sustaining and governing action in nature through the ontological mediation of minds and laws causally constraining their sensations. Furthermore, this proposal yields a positive research program that makes essential use of the contributions of the natural sciences to understand the nature of embodiment. (shrink)

Edward Nelson published in 1986 a book defending an extreme formalist view of mathematics according to which there is an impassable barrier in the totality of exponentiation. On the positive side, Nelson embarks on a program of investigating how much mathematics can be interpreted in Raphael Robinson's theory of arithmetic Q. In the shadow of this program, some very nice logical investigations and results were produced by a number of people, not only regarding what can be interpreted in (...) Q but also what cannot be so interpreted. We explain some of these results and rely on them to discuss Nelson's position. (shrink)

This is a list of corrigenda to the English translation of Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. The list includes 186 entries: most are corrections of outright mistakes in expressing the sense of Heidegger’s text, and twenty-two entries are marked as representing Heidegger’s own revisions to the work as found in the latest German edition. Explanatory comments accompany many of the entries. The corrigenda are offered as a service to scholars of Heidegger’s magnum (...) opus who work within the discipline of philosophy and also to humanistic psychologists who follow the tradition of continental philosophy in their work as practioners and researchers. (shrink)

This is a collection of fifty essays featured in Edward R. Murrow's 1950s This I Believe radio series. It includes such celebrities of the twentieth century as Pearl Buck, Norman Cousins, Margaret Mead, James Michener, Jackie Robinson, and Harry Truman. With an introduction by Edward R. Murrow and a foreword by Dan Gediman, executive producer of the contemporary This I Believe radio broadcasts, heard weekly on public radio.

In this essay, I look at some extraordinary actors who never got their due—actors who had distinguished careers, but never won an Academy Award for acting. I review the work of: Joseph Cotten; Orson Welles; Edward G. Robinson; Cary Grant; James Mason; Richard Burton; Claude Rains; Alan Ladd: Robert Mitchum; and Fred MacMurray. In each case, I explore the actor’s best work, what made his acting outstanding, and offer possible explanations why he was not so honored.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:NOTES AND DISCUSSIONS 69 in pre-Socratic scholarship. But he does not do justice to the religious mood which pervades the whole poem (a mood which is set by the prologue which casts the whole work into the form of some kind of religious revelation). The prologue is considerably more than a mere literary device, and the poem is more than logic. Generally, Jaeger9 and Guthrie are surely correct in (...) their judgment that any adequate interpretation of Parmenides' work (as well as that of the other early Greek thinkers) must be willing to take into account its essentially theological character and religious inspirationl~ not always grasped through strict analysis and exegesis. g Theolooy of the Early C-reekPhilosophers, trans. Edward S. Robinson (Oxford, 1947), p. lff, 90ft. agCf. Guthrie's excellent statement: "...Parmenides was at one with Heraclitus in claiming a prophetic or apocalyptic authority for his teaching." And again, the Greeks believed in "an inspiration whereby-the poet is granted deeper insight into the truth than other men" (p. 6). ED. L. MILLER University of Colorado AN UNKNOWN SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY FRENCH TRANSLATION OF SEXTUS EMPIRICUS* I. Introduction Included in a collection of manuscripts and early printed books recently acquired by the Library of the University of California, Los Angeles, from the Paris bookdealer Paul Jammes ~ are three manuscripts attributed to a certain Nicolas de la Toison, Baron de Bussy. Two of the three volumes contain extensive Latin commentaries on the major writings of Aristotle.2 The third is a miscellaneous volume written in three different hands, which contains, among other things, a complete French translation of the extant writings of Sextus Empiricus (c. A.D. 160-210).3 I * I would like to express my thanks to Mr. Richard O'Brien, Western European Bibliographer of the UCLA Library, for his help in numerous ways, who made it possible for me to consult this material during my sojourn in Los Angeles, even before it had been officially catalogued by the Library. I would also like to thank Professors Donald Kalish and Robert Yost of the UCLA Department of Philosophy for their support in making it possible for the collection to be purchased. 1For a brief description of the collection as a whole see Charles B. Schmitt, "Acquisition of Early French Books and Manuscripts", UCLA Librarian, XIX (1966)~25. 2These two manuscripts are bound m red leather with gold tooling. Thear present shelf mark is Collection 968, Box 2. On the spines is written: (1) PHILOSOPHIA.TO.I, and (2) METAPHYSIC ET PHYSICA TO.2. They measure approximately 10 X 14 cm. and each contains about 600fois. At the beginning of Vol. I, in a later hand (19th century?), we read: "Nicolas de la Thoison, baron de Bussy, qui 6crivit ces m6moires, 6tait conseiller laic au Parlement de Bourgogne. Il fur pourru par la r6signation de Pierre Catherine le IV Ddcembre M.DC.XLV et regu le XXIX janvier M.DC.XLVI. I1portait: de queueles dune bands d'or charges en coeur d'une quints feuiUe d'azur--ainsi qu'on le volt dans le Parlement de Bourgogne [Dijon, 1649]de Pierre PaiUot, p. 326." There is also a drawing of the coat-of-arms which has been described. That the de la Toison coat-of-arms is a quintefeuille is verified by Theodore de Renesse, Dictionnaire des figures h$raldiques (Brussels, 1894-1903) III, 461. The passage cited above from the manuscript is directly quoted from Pierre Paillot, Le Parlement de Bouroongne [I], son origins, son $tablissemerit, et son progr~s (Dijon, 1649), p. 326. s A description of this manuscript will be found in the Appendix. 70 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY shall here only give a preliminary survey of this third manuscript, pointing out some of the more interesting features and mentioning some problems connected with it which should be investigated further in more detail. As is now well-known the writings of Sextus Empiricus, which form the major extant compendium of ancient skeptical philosophy, had quite a significant impact on sixteenth and seventeenth-eentury thought, after their reintroduction in the sixteenth century. ~ Sextus' works were available in printed Latin editions after 15695 and the Greek text was printed in... (shrink)

This paper investigates what I call aesthetic emotions in the “traditional” sense going back to Burke and Kant. According to Kant, aesthetic pleasure is disinterested, and so maybe for Kant aesthetic emotions would be too, for Kant, but emotions by their very nature cannot be disinterested. After dismissing the idea that aesthetic emotions are a special kind of distanced emotions or refined emotions, I extract from the writings of Clive Bell, Peter Kivy, and Peter Lamarque the view that aesthetic emotions (...) are positive, pleasurable, consummatory emotions—emotions of appreciation—which are noninstrumental and which take as their intentional objects the intrinsic qualities of an artwork, more particularly, its formal interrelationships and the way that the overall formal structure of an artwork molds its content. (shrink)

Contemporaries often reject epiphenomenalism out of hand, while Russellian Monism is regarded as worthy of further development. It is argued here that this difference of attitudes is indefensible, because the easy rejection of EPI is due to its violating a certain Causal Intuition, and RM implicitly violates that same intuition. An enriched version of RM mitigates the violation, but the same mitigation results if we make a parallel enrichment of EPI. If RM and EPI are approached on a level playing (...) field, it is not obvious which will prove to be the better view. (shrink)

I aim to explode a famous thesis about “the rise of fictionality,” argued in an essay of that title by Catherine Gallagher. I also have in mind related claims that the eighteenth or the nineteenth century first distinguished fiction from nonfiction or first differentiated literature from other modes of discourse. Gallagher places the rise of fictionality exactly where Ian Watt placed the rise of the novel—England, 1720 to 1740—and she connects it to the development of a credit economy. This article (...) argues that the relationship between fiction and credit goes deeper than this, insofar as fiction was classically theorized in relation to modal concepts like probability and as such had a direct relationship to what Aristotle called endoxa: what is believed by all or by most. Probability was understood in relation not to what happens but to what is thought to happen: that is, to a socially constituted sense of what and who is credible. The article takes account of the multiple disciplines in which fictionality was theorized in the premodern period, but it emphasizes the centrality of rhetoric and the dissemination of a model of fictionality through the early modern grammar schools. Finally, it reads Shakespeare’s Othello to show that probable fiction was not only an available concept but a crucial tool for the analysis of social life. In Othello, ideologies of race and gender define the unequal terms on which credibility is established. Probable fiction is directly tied to the work of making and unmaking social worlds. (shrink)

An interview with Ed Casey where we discuss the intersections of his philosophical work with current political issues, including the Israel-Palestine conflict.

In recent years, a number of authors have called for a return to an ethic of honour as a means of imparting virtue to military personnel. Mark Osiel, for instance, argues that ‘martial honor can be...

Juslin & Vll (J&V) think that all emotions aroused by music have the music itself as their Some of the mechanisms they discuss almost certainly involve both cognitive appraisals and intentional objects. But some of the mechanisms are non-cognitive: they involve neither cognitive appraisals nor intentional objects. Partly for this reason they may produce moods rather than emotions proper.

This is the story of the clattering of elevated subways and the cacophony of crowded neighborhoods, the heady optimism of industrial progress and the despair of economic recession, and the vibrancy of ethnic cultures and the resilience of ...