If we try to evaluate the sentence on line 1 we ¯nd ourselves going in an unending cycle. For this reason alone we may conclude that the sentence is not true. Moreover we are driven to this conclusion by an elementary argument: If the sentence is true then what it asserts is true, but what it asserts is that the sentence on line 1 is not true. Consequently the sentence on line 1 is not true. But when we write this (...) true conclusion on line 2 we ¯nd ourselves repeating the very same sentence. It seems that we are unable to deny the truth of the sentence on line 1 without asserting it at the same time. (shrink)

Naïve realism is the view that veridical experiences are fundamentally relations of acquaintance to external objects and their features, and multidisjunctivism is the conjunction of naïve realism and the view that hallucinatory experiences don’t share a common fundamental kind. Multidisjunctivism allegedly removes the screening-off worry over naïve realism, and the relevant literature suggests that multidisjunctivism is one of the naïve realist responses to the worry. The present paper argues that the multidisjunctive solution is implicitly changing the subject, so the impression (...) that the multidisjunctivist is addressing the screening-off problem is illusory. (shrink)

We present experimental evidence that supports the thesis :602–625, 2015, Br J Philos Sci 70:77–102, 2019; Bradley in Decisions theory with a human face, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2017; Goldschmidt and Nissan-Rozen in Synthese 198:7553–7575, 2021) that people might positively or negatively desire risky prospects conditional on only some of the prospects’ outcomes obtaining. We argue that this evidence has important normative implications for the central debate in normative decision theory between two general approaches on how to rationalize several common (...) patterns of preference, which are ruled out as irrational by orthodox decision theory, namely the re-individuation approach and the non-expected utility approach. (shrink)

In this book, best-selling author and mathematician Haim Shapira presents an introduction to mathematical theories which deal with the most beautiful concept ever invented by humankind: infinity. Written in clear, simple language and aimed at a lay audience, this book also offers some strategies that will allow readers to try their ability at solving truly fascinating mathematical problems. Infinity is a deeply counter-intuitive concept that has inspired many great thinkers. In this book we will meet many sages, both familiar (...) and unfamiliar: Zeno and Pythagoras, Georg Cantor and Bertrand Russell, Sofia Kovalevskaya and Emmy Noether, al-Khwarizmi and Euclid, Sophie Germain and Srinivasa Ramanujan. The world of infinity is inhabited by many paradoxes, and so is this book: Zeno paradoxes, Hilbert's "Infinity Hotel", Achilles and the gods paradox, the paradox of heaven and hell, the Ross-Littlewood paradox involving tennis balls, the Galileo paradox and many more. Aimed at the curious but non-technical reader, this book refrains from using any fearsome mathematical symbols. It uses only the most basic operations of mathematics: adding, subtracting, multiplication, division, powers and roots - that is all. But that doesn't mean that a bit of deep thinking won't be necessary and rewarding. Writing with humour and lightness of touch, Haim Shapira banishes the chalky pallor of the schoolroom and offers instead a truly thrilling intellectual journey. Fasten your seatbelt - we are going to Infinity, and beyond! (shrink)

We improve a theorem of Raisonnier by showing that Cons(ZFC+every Σ 2 1 -set of reals in Lebesgue measurable+every Π 2 1 -set of reals isK σ-regular) implies Cons(ZFC+there exists an inaccessible cardinal). We construct, fromL, a model where every Δ 3 1 -sets of reals is Lebesgue measurable, has the property of Baire, and every Σ 2 1 -set of reals isK σ-regular. We prove that if there exists a Σ n+1 1 unbounded filter on ω, then there exists (...) a nonK σ-regular Π 2 1 -subset. (shrink)

Haim Gordon; Nietzsche's Zarathustra as Educator, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 14, Issue 2, 30 May 2006, Pages 181–192, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.

This biography of Emil du Bois-Reymond, the most important forgotten intellectual of the nineteenth century, received an Honorable Mention for History of Science, Medicine, and Technology at the 2013 PROSE Awards, was shortlisted for the 2014 John Pickstone Prize (Britain's most prestigious award for the best scholarly book in the history of science), and was named by the American Association for the Advancement of Science as one of the Best Books of 2014. -/- In his own time (1818–1896) du Bois-Reymond (...) grew famous for his groundbreaking research in neuroscience and his provocative addresses on politics and culture. His discovery of the electrical transmission of nerve signals, his innovations in laboratory instrumentation, and his reductionist methodology all helped lay the foundations of modern neuroscience. -/- In addition to describing the pioneering experiments that earned du Bois-Reymond a seat in the Prussian Academy of Sciences and a professorship at the University of Berlin, this book also recounts du Bois-Reymond’s family origins, private life, public service, and lasting influence. In talks that touched on science, philosophy, history, and literature, du Bois-Reymond introduced Darwin to German students (triggering two days of debate in the Prussian parliament), asked on the eve of the Franco-Prussian War whether France had forfeited its right to exist, and proclaimed the mystery of consciousness, heralding the age of doubt. The first modern biography in any language, "Emil du Bois-Reymond" recovers an important chapter in the history of science, the history of ideas, and the history of Germany. (shrink)

The article introduces a previously unknown Arabic source detailing the preparations for a battle between local Muslim rulers, likely vassals of the Samanids (204–395/819–1005), against the ruler of Ghaznī and his allies, the Hindushahs, near Ghaznī in the mid-fourth/tenth century. By closely reading, translating, and analyzing this manuscript fragment, I aim to shed light on the political realities of the Indian frontier of the Islamic world before the establishment of the Ghaznavid state (366–583/977–1186). The fragment provides evidence of the clashes (...) among different actors, both Muslim and non-Muslim, in the region that makes up present-day eastern Afghanistan during the pre-Ghaznavid period, especially the fourth/tenth century. Moreover, it highlights the significance of the river valleys of Bāmiyān and Ghūrwand, along with the upper Hilmand’s course, as a frontier region where the Samanids and their vassals sought to expand the influence of Islam and Samanid suzerainty by pushing southward. (shrink)

Many philosophers in the field of meta-ethics believe that rational degrees of confidence in moral judgments should have a probabilistic structure, in the same way as do rational degrees of belief. The current paper examines this position, termed “moral Bayesianism,” from an empirical point of view. To this end, we assessed the extent to which degrees of moral judgments obey the third axiom of the probability calculus, ifP(A∩B)=0thenP(A∪B)=P(A)+P(B), known as finite additivity, as compared to degrees of beliefs on the one (...) hand and degrees of desires on the other. Results generally converged to show that degrees of moral judgment are more similar to degrees of belief than to degrees of desire in this respect. This supports the adoption of a Bayesian approach to the study of moral judgments. To further support moral Bayesianism, we also demonstrated its predictive power. Finally, we discuss the relevancy of our results to the meta-ethical debate between moral cognitivists and moral non-cognitivists. (shrink)

The paper is concerned with the way in which “ontology” and “realism” are to be interpreted and applied so as to give us a deeper philosophical understanding of mathematical theories and practice. Rather than argue for or against some particular realistic position, I shall be concerned with possible coherent positions, their strengths and weaknesses. I shall also discuss related but different aspects of these problems. The terms in the title are the common thread that connects the various sections.

Since its origins in the mid-1980s, DNA profiling has become the most powerful tool for identification in contemporary society. Practitioners have deployed it to determine parentage, verify claims to identity in various civil contexts, identify bodies in wars and mass disasters, and infer the identity of individuals who have left biological traces at crime scenes. Thus DNA profiling can be used to implicate or exonerate individuals from participation in particular social relations and activities; this affords it a growing importance in (...) major social institutions such as the family, the criminal justice system, immigration services, and health services. There are key state, security, civil liberty, personal, and commercial considerations surrounding the reliability and social implications of DNA profiling in establishing the identities of “family members,” “claimants,” “customers,” “suspects,” and “citizens.”Given that DNA profiling is increasingly influential in forensic inquiries, the recently-developed practice in the UK of “familial searching” of DNA databases has the potential to become a significant aspect of investigations. (shrink)

The impetus driving this article is the uncritical uses of ‘culture’ as an explanatory variable in public health research of ‘suicide’, regarding its conceptualization and operationalization as a mentally riddled phenomenon clamped in nomothetic and epidemiological nomenclature. This reduction of suicide to its presumed ‘evidence based’ figures and graphs under the guise of the lingo of culture requires and yields not only ‘thin’ understandings but also non-committal conclusions. Thus, ‘culture’ merely appears as a ‘thing’ made of shared norms and values (...) that arguably can be measured, computed, and even predicted in relation to tables of suicide rates. With the aim of critically un-disciplining and unleashing these two intersecting fuzzy concepts from the straits of their epistemological habitus, we set an alternative scene of relations between them that contribute to the re-conceptualization of both. ‘Suicide cultures’, a term we coined for highlighting temporal, agentive, performative, and social justice questions of suicide and culture, place the preoccupation with mortality and terminality at its core. This turn in the analysis of public health sheds a non-perfunctory light on the cultural parameters of counting of and accounting for the incidence of suicide in different social settings. (shrink)

There are three sections in this paper. The first is a philosophical discussion of the general problem of reasoning under limited deductive capacity. The second sketches a rigorous way of assigning probabilities to statements in pure arithmetic; motivated by the preceding discussion, it can nonetheless be read separately. The third is a philosophical discussion that highlights the shifting contextual character of subjective probabilities and beliefs.

The technique of minimizing information (infomin) has been commonly employed as a general method for both choosing and updating a subjective probability function. We argue that, in a wide class of cases, the use of infomin methods fails to cohere with our standard conception of rational degrees of belief. We introduce the notion of a deceptive updating method and argue that non-deceptiveness is a necessary condition for rational coherence. Infomin has been criticized on the grounds that there are no higher (...) order probabilities that ‘support’ it, but the appeal to higher order probabilities is a substantial assumption that some might reject. Our elementary arguments from deceptiveness do not rely on this assumption. While deceptiveness implies lack of higher order support, the converse does not, in general, hold, which indicates that deceptiveness is a more objectionable property. We offer a new proof of the claim that infomin updating of any strictly-positive prior with respect to conditional-probability constraints is deceptive. In the case of expected-value constraints, infomin updating of the uniform prior is deceptive for some random variables but not for others. We establish both a necessary condition and a sufficient condition (which extends the scope of the phenomenon beyond cases previously considered) for deceptiveness in this setting. Along the way, we clarify the relation which obtains between the strong notion of higher order support, in which the higher order probability is defined over the full space of first order probabilities, and the apparently weaker notion, in which it is defined over some smaller parameter space. We show that under certain natural assumptions, the two are equivalent. Finally, we offer an interpretation of Jaynes, according to which his own appeal to infomin methods avoids the incoherencies discussed in this paper. (shrink)

This chapter contains section titled: What is a Theory of Punishment? Deterrence Theories of Punishment Retributivist Theories of Punishment The Contractarian Alternative Notes References.

A quantum mechanics for nomogenesis is conjectured.

本书系作者专心致志撰写22年而成的150余万字的《新伦理学》(商务印书馆2008年修订版)之精粹。它几乎将每个理论问题都化为一个鲜活的人生案例,通过解析各个案例而系统展现伦理学博大精深之原理,因而名之 为《伦理学与人生》。.

This article examines the science of electrophysiology developed by Emil du Bois-Reymond in Berlin in the 1840s. In it I recount his major findings, the most significant being his proof of the electrical nature of nerve signals. Du Bois-Reymond also went on to detect this same ‘negative variation’, or action current, in live human subjects. In 1850 he travelled to Paris to defend this startling claim. The essay concludes with a discussion of why his demonstration failed to convince his hosts (...) at the French Academy of Sciences. (shrink)

Dummett’s The Logical Foundations of Metaphysics (LFM) outlines an ambitious project that has been at the core of his work during the last forty years. The project is built around a particular conception of the theory of meaning (or philosophy of language), according to which such a theory should constitute the corner stone of philosophy and, in particular, provide answers to various metaphysical questions. The present paper is intended as a critical evaluation of some of the main features of that (...) approach. My negative answer to the title’s question notwithstanding, I find Dummett’s analyses, which both inform and are guided by his project, of very high value. Among the subjects to be discussed here, which relate to but are not fully reflected in the title, are the concept of a full-blooded theory (in 4.) Davidson’s program (in 5.) and holism, to which the last third of this paper (section 6.) is devoted. That section can be read independently; to some extent, this is also true of 4. and 5. taken together. (shrink)

In this work we give a complete answer as to the possible implications between some natural properties of Lebesgue measure and the Baire property. For this we prove general preservation theorems for forcing notions. Thus we answer a decade-old problem of J. Baumgartner and answer the last three open questions of the Kunen-Miller chart about measure and category. Explicitly, in \S1: (i) We prove that if we add a Laver real, then the old reals have outer measure one. (ii) We (...) prove a preservation theorem for countable-support forcing notions, and using this theorem we prove (iii) If we add ω 2 Laver reals, then the old reals have outer measure one. From this we obtain (iv) $\operatorname{Cons}(\mathrm{ZF}) \Rightarrow \operatorname{Cons}(\mathrm{ZFC} + \neg B(m) + \neg U(m) + U(c))$ . In \S2: (i) We prove a preservation theorem, for the finite support forcing notion, of the property " $F \subseteq ^\omega\omega$ is an unbounded family." (ii) We introduce a new forcing notion making the old reals a meager set but the old members of ω ω remain an unbounded family. Using this we prove (iii) $\operatorname{Cons}(\mathrm{ZF}) \Rightarrow \operatorname{Cons}(\mathrm{ZFC} + U(m) + \neg B(c) + \neg U(c) + C(c))$ . In \S3: (i) We prove a preservation theorem, for the finite support forcing notion, of a property which implies "the union of the old measure zero sets is not a measure zero set," and using this theorem we prove (ii) $\operatorname{Cons}(\mathrm{ZF}) \Rightarrow \operatorname{Cons}(\mathrm{ZFC} + \neg U(m) + C(m) + \neg C(c))$. (shrink)

We show the Borel Conjecture is consistent with the continuum large.

This article seeks to establish that the social sciences have an important contribution to make to the study of ethics. The discussion is framed around three questions: (i) what theoretical work can the social sciences contribute to the understanding of ethics? (ii) what empirical work can the social sciences contribute to the understanding of ethics? And (iii) how does this theoretical and empirical work combine, to enhance the understanding of how ethics, as a field of analysis and debate, is socially (...) constituted and situated? Through these questions the argument goes beyond the now commonly cited objection to the over‐simplistic division between normative and descriptive ethics (that assigns the social sciences the ‘handmaiden’ role of simply providing the ‘facts’). In extending this argument, this article seeks to establish, more firmly and in more detail, that: (a) the social sciences have a longstanding theoretical interest analysing the role that a concern with ethics plays in explanations of social change, social organisation and social action; (b) the explanations that are based on the empirical investigations conducted by social scientists exemplify the interplay of epistemological and methodological analyses so that our understanding of particular substantive issues is extended beyond the conventional questions raised by ethicists, and (c) through this combination of theoretical and empirical work, social scientists go beyond the specific ethical questions of particular practices to enquire further into the social processes that lie behind the very designation of certain matters as being ‘ethical issues’. (shrink)

We build models where all $\underset{\sim}{\triangle}^1_3$ -sets of reals are measurable and (or) have the property of Baire and (or) are Ramsey. We will show that there is no implication between any of these properties for $\underset{\sim}{\triangle}^1_3$ -sets of reals.