Combining theological and medical perspectives is indispensable for the historical study of the interconnections between mind, body, and soul. This article explores these relations through the history of Finnish psychosomatic medicine, and uses published and archival materials to examine the intellectual biography of the Finland-Swedish theologian turned psychiatrist Asser Stenbäck (1913–2006). Stenbäck's career, which evolved from priesthood to psychiatry and politics, reveals a great deal about the tensions between religion and medicine, the spiritual and scientific groups that impinged upon (...) psychosomatic medicine, and ideas on how health and Christian morality were interconnected. The biographical approach is adopted to unearth the values encoded in medical concepts, and through this, to point towards another, underexplored dimension of the health–religion relationship. In addition to their emotional aspect, religious doctrines are intended to organise life and give it meaning. Stenbäck's ideas tied these experiential and normative spheres together by defending an irrationalist substratum of the world in the secular age of medicine. His work illustrates how the inner experience of faith can become both medically and politically purposive. It is worth combining these perspectives in historical research as well in order to better understand how the theological, medical, and political worlds are in dialogue when it comes to human problems. (shrink)

Recently, G. ASSER has obtained two interesting characterizations of the class of unary primitive recursive string-functions over a fixed alphabet as Robinson algebras. Both characterizations use a somewhat artificial string-function, namely the string-function lexicographically associated with the number-theoretical excess-over-a-square function. Our aim is to offer two new and natural Robinson algebras which are equivalent to ASSER’S algebras.

Materialism in the philosophy of mind is the thesis that the ultimate nature of the mind is physical; there is no sharp discontinuity in nature between the mental and the non-mental. Anti-materialists asser t that, on the contrary, mental phenomena are different in kind from physical phenomena. Among the weapons in the arsenal of anti-materialists, one of the most potent has been the conceivability argument. When I conceive of the mental, it seems utterly unlike the physical. Anti-materialists insist that (...) from this intuitive difference we can infer a genuine meta-physical difference. Materialists retor t that the nature of reality, including the ultimate natures of its constituents, is a matter for discovery; an objective fact that cannot be discerned a priori. In this paper I under take to provide an explicit analysis of the dialectic that surrounds the conceivability argument. My principal conclusion is that the materialist is right in resisting the reasoning that star ts from considerations of what is conceivable and ends with genuine metaphysical conclusions. However my approach is much more sympathetic to the anti-materialist position than is the standard materialist line, and I will provide a limited defense of some crucial aspects of the anti-materialist position. Materialism will emerge from this fight intact, but shaken. (shrink)

In 1952, Heinrich Scholz published a question in The Journal of Symbolic Logic asking for a characterization of spectra, i.e., sets of natural numbers that are the cardinalities of finite models of first order sentences. Günter Asser in turn asked whether the complement of a spectrum is always a spectrum. These innocent questions turned out to be seminal for the development of finite model theory and descriptive complexity. In this paper we survey developments over the last 50-odd years pertaining (...) to the spectrum problem. Our presentation follows conceptual developments rather than the chronological order. Originally a number theoretic problem, it has been approached by means of recursion theory, resource bounded complexity theory, classification by complexity of the defining sentences, and finally by means of structural graph theory. Although Scholz' question was answered in various ways, Asser's question remains open. (shrink)

Moore’s paradox occurs with sentences, such as (1) It’s raining and I don’t think it’s raining. which are self-defeating in a way that prevents one from making an asser- tion with them.1 But Mark Crimmins has given us a case of a sentence that is syntactically just like (1) but is nonetheless assertible. Suppose I know somebody, and know or have excellent reason to believe that I know that very person under some other guise. I do not know what (...) that other guise is, though I do know that I believe that the person I know under that other guise is an idiot. (shrink)

This paper is dedicated to Prof. Dr. Günter Asser, whose work in founding this journal and maintaining it over many difficult years has been a major contribution to the activities of the mathematical logic community.At first sight it appears highly unlikely that Urysohn's Lemma has any significant constructive content. However, working in the context of an apartness space and using functions whose values are a generalisation of the reals, rather than real numbers, enables us to produce a significant constructive (...) version of that lemma. (shrink)

LetL 3 c be the smallest set of propositional formulas, which containsCpCqpCCCpqCrqCCqpCrpCCCpqCCqrqCCCpqppand is closed with respect to substitution and detachment. Let $\mathfrak{M}_3^c $ be Łukasiewicz’s three-valued implicational matrix defined as follows:cxy=min (1,1−x+y), where $x,y \in \{ 0,\tfrac{1}{2},1\}$ . In this paper the following theorem is proved: $$L_3^c = E( \mathfrak{M}_3^c )$$ The idea used in the proof is derived from Asser’s proof of completeness of the two-valued propositional calculus. The proof given here is based on the Pogorzelski’s deduction theorem (...) fork-valued propositional calculi and on Lindenbaum’s theorem. (shrink)

I hope you have had no trouble identifying this issue of our journal, even if the cover has been changed slightly. I would like to draw your attention to a more essential improvement in the journal's affairs: namely, that the Editorial Board has been enlarged by four new members. These are the following: Douglas Bridges , Ulrich Kohlenbach , H. Dugald Macpherson , and Pavel Pudlak . Please don't hesitate to contact a fellow editor, in particular the managing editor, if (...) you have suggestions for improving either the editorial procedures or the content and form of MLQ.The aims and scope of our journal are unchanged from the original ones developed by Günter Asser. His name is indissolubly connected with the former “Zeitschrift für Mathematische Logik und Grundlagen der Mathematik ”, now known as “Mathematical Logic Quarterly ”. He was one of the two founding editors and then the editor-in-chief of the journal until the 50th volume appeared about one year ago. Single-handedly, and almost incredibly, he showed that it is possible for one man to be the main editor of a successful highlevel scientific journal throughout half a century. He remains involved in and concerned with the editorial process of MLQ. For example, he carefully looks at every article to be published, faithfully checking almost every line of the final layout.On 26 February 2006, Professor Dr. Günter Asser celebrates his 80th birthday. I would like to take this opportunity, on behalf of the whole readership and of all fellow editors of ZML and MLQ throughout the last 51 years, to congratulate him cordially and to wish him good health and all the best for the future.The present issue starts with a paper directly related to G. Asser's spectrum conjecture. Then there are some papers specially dedicated to him, as well as further contributions, as always scrutinised and then recommended by expert referees. So this turns out to be an appropriate birthday issue. (shrink)