Canaanite Scribes in the Amarna Letters. By Juan-Pablo Vita. Alter Orient und Altes Testament, vol. 406. Münster: Ugarit-Verlag, 2015. Pp. xii + 179, 78 plates. €97.

Understanding the social bases of what John Rawls meant by justice requires understanding a central part of Rawls’s professional life: his role as a teacher. As this essay shows, Rawls’s approach to teaching was not ancillary to his approach to heady philosophical issues like the justification of moral reasoning. Rather, there’s an ethic that runs through Rawls’s work, one focused on deliberation and consensus-seeking, and one whose strengths and weaknesses are easiest to see when you examine his teaching.

This article attempts to descriptively characterize the impact of the sharing economy, using Uber as an example, on the social welfare of those people working via the app. For this purpose, the author proposes a theoretical concept of a technologically networked economy, which is a component of a broader heuristic model of a technologically networked reality. Furthermore, a critical review of the different approaches to the sharing economy and the diverse practices within it have been carried out. The results of (...) the theoretical exploration of this increasingly popular phenomenon revealed parallels with the problems of nondigital labor markets in the field of the workforce. The clear separation of grassroots sharing practices from those in name only like Uber suggest that the latter do not realize social welfare more broadly than ordinary capitalist enterprises. (shrink)

John Buridan was a fourteenth-century philosopher who enjoyed an enormous reputation for about two hundred years, was then totally neglected, and is now being 'rediscovered' through his relevance to contemporary work in philosophical logic. The final chapter of Buridan's Sophismata deals with problems about self-reference, and in particular with the semantic paradoxes. He offers his own distinctive solution to the well-known 'Liar Paradox' and introduces a number of other paradoxes that will be unfamiliar to most logicians. Buridan also moves on (...) from these problems to more general questions about the nature of propositions, the criteria of their truth and falsity and the concepts of validity and knowledge. This edition of that chapter is intended to make Buridan's ideas and arguments accessible to a wider range of readers. The volume should interest many philosophers, linguists and logicians, who are increasingly finding in medieval work striking anticipations of their own concerns. (shrink)

Taking a set of central issues from ancient Greek medicine and biology, this book studies firstly, the interaction between scientific theorising and folklore or popular assumptions; secondly, the ideological character of scientific inquiry. Topics of interest in the philosphy and sociology of science illuminated here include the relationship between primitive thought and early science, the roles of the consensus on the scientific community, tradition and the authority of the written text, in the development of science.

This book is a study of the origins and development of Greek science, focusing especially on the interactions of scientific and traditional patterns of thought from the sixth to the fourth centuries BC. The starting point is an examination of how certain Greek authors deployed the category of 'magic' and attacked magical beliefs and practices, and these attacks are related to their complex background in Greek medicine and speculative thought. In his second chapter Dr Lloyd outlines the development, and assesses (...) the significance, of the theory and practice of argument in early Greek science, and he follows this with a study of the development of empirical research. Finally the author confronts the question of why the Greeks invented science: what precisely was their contribution to science, and what social, economic, ideological and political factors had a bearing on the growth of science in Greece. (shrink)

First published in 2000, this translation of one of the great works of Western political thought is based on the assumption that when Plato chose the dialogue form for his writing, he intended these dialogues to sound like conversations - although conversations of a philosophical sort. In addition to a vivid, dignified and accurate rendition of Plato's text, the student and general reader will find many aids to comprehension in this volume: an introduction that assesses the cultural background to the (...) Republic, its place within political philosophy, and its general argument; succinct notes in the body of the text; an analytical summary of the work's content; a full glossary of proper names; a chronology of important events; and a guide to further reading. The result is an accomplished and accessible edition of this seminal work, suitable for philosophers and classicists as well as historians of political thought at all levels. (shrink)

This book, published in 1986, addresses questions concerned with a central normative principle in contemporary assessments of economic policies and systems. What does 'consumer sovereignty' mean? Is consumer sovereignty an appropriate principle for the optimization and evaluation of the design and performance of economic policies, institutions and systems? If not, what is a more appropriate principle? The author argues that the conception of consumer sovereignty has to be broadened so that it is not limited to the market mechanism but includes (...) environmental, work and social preferences. However, even this version runs into serious difficulties as the principle of consumer sovereignty still relies on too subjectivist a conception of the interests of individuals to be suitable for the evaluation of economic institutions. An alternative basis for such evaluation is 'human interests' that are not contingent on particular economic systems, After considering various possibilities, a basic-needs approach is proposed and its use in economic evaluation illustrated. (shrink)

The question of determining the genuine works of Hippocrates, a topic already much discussed by the ancient commentators, still continues to be actively debated, although the disagreements among scholars remain, it seems, almost as wide as ever. In comparatively recent times, Edelstein's IIEPI AEPQN and two subsequent studies of his written in the 1930s and marked a turning-point in that they presented a particularly clear and comprehensive statement of the sceptical view, according to which Hippocrates is, as Wilamowitz put it (...) long ago, ‘ein beriihmter Name ohne den Hintergrund irgend einer Schrift’. (shrink)

In German criminal law, intention is the label used not only for cases of knowledge and desire; it also includes cases of what the common law would call recklessness. German criminal law calls its approximation of recklessness dolus eventualis. It is on that concept that the article concentrates. After a brief review of the historical development of the German concept of intention, the author shows that dolus eventualis consists of two components: the cognitive element, which (as in the common law) (...) considers the state of the accused's knowledge that the offence may occur, and a volitional or dispositional element which is unknown to the common law. The author concludes that the volitional or dispositional element is not plausible, and that in any harmonization of concepts of intention in the criminal law of the European countries such an element should not be adopted. (shrink)

The terms complexity, complex adaptive systems, and sciences of complexity are found often in recent scientific literature, reflecting the remarkable growth in collaborative academic research focused on complexity from the origin and dynamics of organisms to the largest social and political organizations. One of the great challenges in this field of research is to discover which features are essential and shared by all of the seemingly disparate systems that are described as complex. Is there sufficient synthesis to suggest the possibility (...) of an overarching science of complexity? This report describes current views on this subject held by various eminent scholars associated with the Santa Fe Institute.The physical sciences have traditionally been concerned with “simple” systems whose dynamics can be described in mathematical terms with precision and certainty. In contrast, the biological and social sciences are inevitably concerned with self-organized or social “complex” systems whose detailed behaviors appear to be unpredictable. The two categories differ greatly in size and diversity, prompting the late mathematician Stanislaus Ulam to remark that research on complex systems might be compared to the study of non-elephants. Nevertheless, certain integrative themes have begun to emerge.Rising activity in this field of research runs completely counter to the trend toward increasing fragmentation and specialization in the sciences. It has stimulated a resurgence of interest in a broad synthesis involving mathematics, computational science, physics, chemistry, biology, neuroscience, and the social sciences. The growth of effort in this very extended field has been greatly stimulated by the development of new computational tools that are capable of dealing with vast, interrelated databases. Many of the participants in complexity research feel that it is now time to reintegrate the fragmented interests of much of the academic community. The reader is encouraged to consider whether such views are sparking a historic renaissance of scholarship or represent a passing scientific diversion. (shrink)

Devant l’intuitionisme, on conçoit un cours d’analyse amputé du nombre irrationnel. Des théorèmes qui semblent liés à l’arithmétisation du continu subsistent pourtant, dans le style finitiste, remplaçant le style totalitaire. Le trait d’union est le critère de convergence de Cauchy. Cette idée révèle des domaines de non-contradiction et favorise les efforts de coordination, par exemple pour les problèmes d’une infinité d’équations à une infinité d’inconnues.

It is commonly supposed that in the eighth century B.c. there was a ‘population explosion’ in Greece which moved the Greeks to send out colonies. A. J. Graham in the Cambridge Ancient History iii, 3 is typical: ‘The basic active cause of the colonizing movement was overpopulation’; ‘at the very time when the Archaic colonising movement began, in the second half of the eighth century, there was a marked increase in population in Greece’ . The presumed connection between overpopulation and (...) colonisation is not immediately obvious. The evidence for the population explosion is found in the increased number of burials in Attica and the Argolid, but Athens sent out no colony before the very end of the seventh century and Argos probably none at all, certainly none in this period. So special explanations have to be formulated for Athens' and Argos' lack of colonies while their postulated ‘population explosion’ is presumed for Greece as a whole and called in to explain the burst of colonising in the eighth century. The hypothesis is not used for seventh-century colonisation when the number of burials declines. (shrink)