Special relativity was based on the theorem that time is affected by motion. Einstein's proof of this was an imaginary experiment with clocks, using light as a synchronizing signal. He has said that the kind of signal was immaterial. Subsequent interpreters have stated that sound signals could just as well have been used. Today any airplane passenger's watch denies Einstein's mathematics, had he used sound. The Lorentz-Einstein transformation equations in which the speed of sound is substituted for the speed of (...) light are unthinkable. But if they do not hold with sound as the signal, no more do they with light, for the process is identical. The transformation equations for space are based on the variability of time, and are therefore likewise denied. (shrink)

The 423 verses in the collection known a The Dhammapada are attributed to the Buddha himself and form the essence of the ethics of Buddhist philosophy.

Ambient assisted living technologies can provide assistance and support to persons with dementia. They might allow them the possibility of living at home for longer whilst maintaining their comfort and security as well as offering a way towards reducing the huge economic and personal costs forecast as the incidence of dementia increases worldwide over coming decades. However, the development, introduction and use of AAL technologies also trigger serious ethical issues. This paper is a systematic literature review of the on-going scholarly (...) debate about these issues. More specifically, we look at the ethical issues involved in research and development, clinical experimentation, and clinical application of AAL technologies for people with dementia and related stakeholders. In the discussion we focus on: the value of the goals of AAL technologies, the special vulnerability of persons with dementia in their private homes, the complex question of informed consent for the usage of AAL technologies. (shrink)

This book elucidates T. F. Torrance’s reconstruction of natural theology as it appears within its intellectual context and broader Christological method. Irving argues that Torrance’s work on natural theology is an important affirmation of the priority of grace in theological method and knowledge alongside the integrity of human agency.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Logic Pamphlets of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson and Related PiecesIrving H. AnellisFrancine F. Abeles, editor. The Logic Pamphlets of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson and Related Pieces. The Pamphlets of Lewis Carroll, 4. New York-Charlottesville-London: Lewis Carroll Society of North America-University Press of Virginia, 2010. Pp. xx + 271. Cloth, $75.00.Until William Bartley’s rediscovery and reconstruction of Dodgson’s lost Part II of Symbolic Logic, Lewis Carroll’s reputation in logic, when (...) taken seriously, rested upon his few published articles on logical paradoxes and puzzles, while his published books, The Game of Logic and Symbolic Logic, were regarded as suitable perhaps as pedagogical tools, but dismissed otherwise as amusements, on a par with the Alice works. Richard Braithwaite asserted (“Lewis Carroll as Logician”) that “Carroll regarded formal and symbolic logic not as a corpus of systematic knowledge about valid thought nor yet as an art for teaching a person to think correctly.” He suggested that Dodgson used his pseudonym for his popular and whimsical writings, reserving his legal name only for his serious mathematical products. Philosophers practicing linguistic analysis in their assault on nonsense deriving from misuse of language meanwhile developed an interest in Carroll (e.g. George Pitcher, “Wittgenstein, Nonsense, and Lewis Carroll”). Abeles, on the contrary, stresses the seriousness of Dodgson’s pedagogical and popularizing mission (195–99).Bartley’s discovery opened the door for reevaluating Dodgson as a serious logician, and Abeles has been in the forefront of that reevaluation. Her general introduction and introductions to the main divisions of this collection of Carroll’s publications (and additional material from his Nachlass and a handful of publications of others, composed in response to Carroll’s published articles) place his serious logical work and its significance in historical perspective, providing a deeper, more sophisticated view than found in Bartley’s “Editor’s Introduction” to Lewis Carroll’s Symbolic Logic. Abeles also offers brief introductions to the individual entries, which describe their physical characteristics and circumstances of composition.Dodgson aligned with the majority of those British logicians of his day, starting with George Boole, who understood formal logic to be Aristotelian syllogistic, and symbolic logic to be syllogistic logic expressed algebraically. His notational innovation was employing indices to terms so that, independently of the arrangement of terms, propositions could easily be read; thus, “xy0” can be read as “no x are y” or “no y are x” and “x1y0” as “all x are not y” or “no x are y”. In dealing with the classical elimination problem in the class calculus—to determine the maximum information, without duplications, obtainable from a given set of premises—Dodgson in his later work and unpublished letters anticipated several concepts of automated theorem proving.Central to both geometry and to formal logic are the rules of logical inference that establish the validity of arguments and guarantee that conclusions inferred from true [End Page 506] premises are true. The modern analytic tableaux, or tree method, is a fundamental tool in this regard, both for deriving theorems and for determining the validity or invalidity of the proofs for propositional calculus and first-order predicate calculus.Introducing his reconstruction of Part II of Symbolic Logic, Bartley noted that, along with the logic diagrams that Carroll devised, he also devised a tableau method that strongly resembled Beth’s semantic tableaux. Abeles went more deeply and convincingly into that resemblance in her earlier research. Beth’s tableaux, together with Hintikka’s model sets, were the direct ancestors of Smullyan’s analytic tableaux, which in turn are the theoretical basis for the Robinson resolution method that continues to be central to much work in programming logic.Abeles has also shown that the work in Studies in Logic by Charles Peirce and his logic students at Johns Hopkins University served as a source of inspiration for Dodgson. More critically, she demonstrated that Dodgson devised and employed the tree method for carrying out proofs of syllogisms and chains of syllogisms, or soriteses, in Part II of Symbolic Logic (see her “Lewis Carroll’s Method of Trees: Its Origins in Studies in Logic,” Modern Logic 1 [1990]: 25–34). The tree... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Toward a Political Economy of the Libro De AlexandreSimone Pinet (bio)The carefully composed and craftily pronounced stanzas of the thirteenth-century Libro de Alexandre, if mostly a (free) translation of Gautier de Châtillon’s Alexandreis, provide readers with glimpses of northern Iberia in descriptions and comparisons, but especially through curious formulations and eloquent rewritings.1 These incite the reader to reflect upon the emergence of the vernacular regime of literary composition by (...) clerics that developed in the thirteenth century, a corpus known to us as the mester de clerecía. In this corpus, the use of the vernacular, in particular, brings with it an unproblematized sense of transparency of the context in which the works of mester de clerecía were produced, a genre of which the Libro de Alexandre is a key poetic point of origin. Next to an emphasis on a Latinate syntax and recitation techniques that underline the corpus’s clerical production, the irruption of quotidian phrases, vocabulary, figures of medievalization, and especially of Iberization, make these texts a privileged site to study the articulation of the varied phenomena that from economics to the grammatical, from Aristotle to technology, come to revolutionize medieval culture from the twelfth century onward. Of the many peculiar uses of the vernacular in the Libro de Alexandre, references that connote a sense of worthlessness through the repeated structure “not worth an X, ” especially those that express the comparison with minted coinage of little value: dinero, meaja, pepión, or sueldo, as in “not worth a penny,”2 will serve here as a point of entry. These hyperbolic [End Page 44] expressions, common to Romance languages, underline not only the moral and economic ambivalence of terms such as preçio, valor, honor, pagar(se), dar crédito, and so forth, but also the incorporation of a monetary economy within this ambivalence. These types of expressions, moreover, produce a linguistic marker for such ambiguity, as Louis F. Sas noted when he underlined the “affect” which marks, at the level of speech, the reference to abstract terms such as infinity, nothing, and zero in these types of constructions [469, 471].3Sas notes that the vast majority of the occurrences of these phrases in the Libro de Alexandre happen “in combination with the word valer, with its synonyms, or with dar por, that is, in contexts of exchange” [475]. Many years before Sas exhaustively documented these expressions, Alois Richard Nykl had interpreted their presence as related to barter and a supposed clerical contact with local markets, which to some extent could explain their frequent use in the poem, and he especially mentioned the use of fruits and vegetables in these expressions. Nykl also suggested these were “rustic” similes, favored by men of the clergy such as Berceo, Juan Ruiz, and the authors of the Alexandre and the Fernán González, showing, in his opinion, these men’s contact with a certain world in which fruits and vegetables could serve as payment for the church or diezmo, bringing in through this curious interpretation not only a historical economic context but also its [End Page 45] qualification as something “rustic” or at least foreign to the cleric [311].4In 1929, a couple of years after Nykl’s article appeared, George Irving Dale would correct his affirmations, noting that the expressions called “rustic” by Nykl belonged to a well-studied figure called figurative negation. Dale remarked that figurative negation appeared already in the Poema de mio Cid, and he directed the reader to the bibliography offered by Menéndez Pidal in his edition of the Poema under the title of “Refuerzo de la Negación” [Cantar de Mio Cid 1: 376 and glossary]. In his article, Dale wrote in passing that the type of adjectives used with these expressions “increases the insignificance or lack of value” [324]. Later, agreeing with Dale, Sas wrote that the emphasis added to these phrases through the use of adjectives such as vile or rotten did not point to any medieval particular practice beyond that of a peculiar affect, which has been interpreted in terms of “simplicity.” In the next pages I want to suggest some lines of... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Toward a Political Economy of the Libro De AlexandreSimone Pinet (bio)The carefully composed and craftily pronounced stanzas of the thirteenth-century Libro de Alexandre, if mostly a (free) translation of Gautier de Châtillon’s Alexandreis, provide readers with glimpses of northern Iberia in descriptions and comparisons, but especially through curious formulations and eloquent rewritings.1 These incite the reader to reflect upon the emergence of the vernacular regime of literary composition by (...) clerics that developed in the thirteenth century, a corpus known to us as the mester de clerecía. In this corpus, the use of the vernacular, in particular, brings with it an unproblematized sense of transparency of the context in which the works of mester de clerecía were produced, a genre of which the Libro de Alexandre is a key poetic point of origin. Next to an emphasis on a Latinate syntax and recitation techniques that underline the corpus’s clerical production, the irruption of quotidian phrases, vocabulary, figures of medievalization, and especially of Iberization, make these texts a privileged site to study the articulation of the varied phenomena that from economics to the grammatical, from Aristotle to technology, come to revolutionize medieval culture from the twelfth century onward. Of the many peculiar uses of the vernacular in the Libro de Alexandre, references that connote a sense of worthlessness through the repeated structure “not worth an X, ” especially those that express the comparison with minted coinage of little value: dinero, meaja, pepión, or sueldo, as in “not worth a penny,”2 will serve here as a point of entry. These hyperbolic [End Page 44] expressions, common to Romance languages, underline not only the moral and economic ambivalence of terms such as preçio, valor, honor, pagar(se), dar crédito, and so forth, but also the incorporation of a monetary economy within this ambivalence. These types of expressions, moreover, produce a linguistic marker for such ambiguity, as Louis F. Sas noted when he underlined the “affect” which marks, at the level of speech, the reference to abstract terms such as infinity, nothing, and zero in these types of constructions [469, 471].3Sas notes that the vast majority of the occurrences of these phrases in the Libro de Alexandre happen “in combination with the word valer, with its synonyms, or with dar por, that is, in contexts of exchange” [475]. Many years before Sas exhaustively documented these expressions, Alois Richard Nykl had interpreted their presence as related to barter and a supposed clerical contact with local markets, which to some extent could explain their frequent use in the poem, and he especially mentioned the use of fruits and vegetables in these expressions. Nykl also suggested these were “rustic” similes, favored by men of the clergy such as Berceo, Juan Ruiz, and the authors of the Alexandre and the Fernán González, showing, in his opinion, these men’s contact with a certain world in which fruits and vegetables could serve as payment for the church or diezmo, bringing in through this curious interpretation not only a historical economic context but also its [End Page 45] qualification as something “rustic” or at least foreign to the cleric [311].4In 1929, a couple of years after Nykl’s article appeared, George Irving Dale would correct his affirmations, noting that the expressions called “rustic” by Nykl belonged to a well-studied figure called figurative negation. Dale remarked that figurative negation appeared already in the Poema de mio Cid, and he directed the reader to the bibliography offered by Menéndez Pidal in his edition of the Poema under the title of “Refuerzo de la Negación” [Cantar de Mio Cid 1: 376 and glossary]. In his article, Dale wrote in passing that the type of adjectives used with these expressions “increases the insignificance or lack of value” [324]. Later, agreeing with Dale, Sas wrote that the emphasis added to these phrases through the use of adjectives such as vile or rotten did not point to any medieval particular practice beyond that of a peculiar affect, which has been interpreted in terms of “simplicity.” In the next pages I want to suggest some lines of... (shrink)

Irving H. Buchen projects the future of public education for the next 25 years as he identifies and examines the major drivers of change, profiles all the critical educational constituencies, and offers a number of common sense solutions to current and subsequent problems.

... Press for their editorial perspicacity, to the National Institutes of Health for the partial financial support they gave me while I was writing some of the chapters, and to Donald Michie for suggesting the title Good Thinking.

Although mind‐wandering research is rapidly progressing, stark disagreements are emerging about what the term “mind‐wandering” means. Four prominent views define mind‐wandering as (a) task‐unrelated thought, (b) stimulus‐independent thought, (c) unintentional thought, or (d) dynamically unguided thought. Although theorists claim to capture the ordinary understanding of mind‐wandering, no systematic studies have assessed these claims. Two large factorial studies present participants (N = 545) with vignettes that describe someone's thoughts and ask whether her mind was wandering, while systematically manipulating features relevant to (...) the four major accounts of mind‐wandering. Dynamics explains between four and 40 times more variance in participants' mind‐wandering judgments than other features. Our third study (N = 153) tests and supports a unique prediction of the dynamic framework—obsessive rumination contrasts with mind‐wandering. Our final study (N = 277) used vignettes that resemble mind‐wandering experiments. Dynamics had significant and large effects, while task‐unrelatedness was nonsignificant. These results strongly suggest that the central feature of mind‐wandering is its dynamics. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:NECESSARY PROPOSITIONS AND THE SQUARE OF OPPOSITION MARK ROBERTS University of Rhode Island Kingston, Rhode Island IT IS COMMONPLACE to define contradictory, contrary, and subcontrary propositions in the following way: contradictory propositions cannot both be true and cannot both be false; contrary propositions cannot both be true but can both be false; and subcontrary propositions can both be true but cannot both be false. In his Introduction to Logic (...) 1 Irving Copi raises a problem with two of these definitions which he believes forces him to limit the range of propositions which can be used in the square of opposition. Since contrary propositions can both be false, but the falsity of a necessarily true proposition is not possible, a necessarily true proposition has no contrary. Therefore, only contingent propositions can be contraries. Subcontrary propositions can both be true, but the truth of a necessarily false proposition is not possible.2 This problem is rarely raised in other logic texts, but, it is interesting to note, it is mentioned by a number of neoscholastic philosophers, for example, P. Nicholas Russo,3 Rev. H. Grenier,4 1 Irving M. Copi, Introduction to Logic (New York: Macmillan, 1986), pp. 178-179. Copi first introduced this problem in the fifth edition of his work on the basis of an article by David H. Sanford entitled " Contraries and Subcontraries,'' Nous 2 (1968) : 95-96. Sanford argues that the most reasonable way to resolve the problem of necessary propositions is to assume that contingent propositions comprise the square of opposition. 2 Copi, pp. 178-179. 8 Nicholas Russo, Summa Philosophica (Boston: Apud Marlier et Socios, 1[;85), p. 23. 4 Henri Grenier, Thomistic Philosophy, Vol. I (Charlottetown, Canada: St. Dunstan's University, 1950), p. 69. 427 428 MARK ROBERTS G. Sanseverino,5 Jacques Maritain,6 F.-X. Maquart,7 P. Coffey,8 and others.9 (It is also mentioned by Bishop Whately.10 ) Each of these philosophers makes necessarily true or false propositions an exception to the definition of contrary and subcontrary propositions. The reason is they and Copi interpret the definitions of contrary and subcontrary propositions to mean that the falsity of each contrary proposition is possible and the truth of each subcontrary proposition is possible. It should be mentioned, however, that the position of the philosophers cited above is not entirely the same as Copi's. Copi reasons that these definitions imply that necessary propositions have no contrary or subcontrary. The other philosophers believe that necessary propositions can be contraries and subcontraries. Thus, in the case of necessary propositions contrary and subcontrary propositions are, instead, defined merely in terms of their quantity and quality, not by whether or not they can both be false or can both be true. In fact, Coffey and some of the other philosophers cited above assert that, when the propositions composing the square are necessary, one can infer the truth of the universal from the truth of 5 Gaietano Sanseverino, Philosophia Christiana, Vol. II (Neapoli: Vincentii Manfredi, 1862), pp. DCCXXXVIII ff. 6 J. Maritain, An Introduction to Logic (London: Sheed & Ward, 1937), p. 135, notes 1 & 2. 7 F.-X. Maquart, Elementa Philosophiae, Vol. I (Parisiis: Andreas Blot, 1937)' p. 126 ff. 8 P. Coffey, The Science of Logic, Vol. 1 (New York: Longmans, Green & Co., 1918), p. 225, 226. 9 Joseph Gredt, Elementa Philosophiae, Vol. I (Friburgi: Herder, 1929), p. 46, notes 1 & 2; Sylvester J. Hartman, A Textbook of Logic (New York: American Book Co., 1936), p. 162 ff; Roland Houde and Jerome J. Fischer, Handbook of Logic (Dubuque, Iowa: Wm. C. Brown Co., 1954), p. 61; Eduard Hugon, Cursus Philosophiae Thomisticae, Vol. I (Parisiis: P. Lethielleux n.d), p. 155; Dennis C. Kane, Logic: The Art of Predication and Inference (Providence: Providence College Press, 1978), p. 98 ff; Francis P. Siegfried, Essentialia Philosophiae (Philadelphia: Dolphin Press, 1927), p. 25; Francis Varvello, Minor Logic, trans. and supplemented Arthur D. Fearon (San Francisco: Univ. of San Francisco Press, 1933), p. 73 ff. 10 Richard Whately, Elements of Logic (Boston: James Munroe & Co., 1854), p. 77 ff. PROPOSITIONS AND THE SQUARE OF OPPOSITION 429 the particular and the falsity of the particular from the falsity of the universal.11 Maritain maintains that in the case... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:THE MUNUS OF TRANSMITTING HUMAN LIFE: A NEW APPROACH TO I-IUMANAE VITAE JANET E. SMITH University of Dallas Irving, Texas 'TIRE ONLY ACQUAINTANCE 1bhat most rea;ders have with the Latin of Humanae Vitae is the tit1le. It is likey that fow laymen and perhaps eV'en fow schofars make ire:ferenoe to the Latin text; indeed, it is ireported that I-Iumanae Vitae was originally composed in ltalian, and it seems (...) that aH available translations of the text al'e based primarily on the Italian V'ersion. But since the official text of Humanae Vitae is in Latin and since translations are necessa11ily deficient, we shouild not be surprised that the ava:ilahle translations fail to convey a:M the nuances of the official text. (Latin, of course, is tihe langua:ge in which all official documents of the Church are written.) This study seeks to show that attenti¥eness to certain words fa the Latin text, most particularly the word munus, uncovers important eonnections between Humanae Vitae and pe['spect[ves of the Church, perspectives particularly highlighted in the documents of Vatican II. It also seeks to show that the La.tin provides greater philosophical precision for certain key teaohings of the text, most particularly section 11: "each and every maritail act must remain open to proc11eation." It is ii.mportant to note that some of the crucial Latin words of the document cal'ry connotations tihat cannot possibly be captured ihy 1any one English word. Indeed, some of the words convey concepts and attitudes that are quite foreign to speak:iers of modern English; to convey the meaning of some terms requires a. fairly lengthy expl,ication of notions not immed :iate1ly and directly graspaible hy ail readers. Even to the reade[' of Latin, the text does not 'easily ~eld its secrets. The 385 386 JANET E. SMITH Latin of the document has no identifiahle souTee of reliabJe deoipherment; it is a kind of " modern " 0 1 r " Church " Latin, which is an odd comhinat~on of elassical Latin and the lang1uage the Ohurch ha:s deve1oped oveil.' the centuries. The method of translation employed here has invo1 lved consultation of classical and medieval dictionaries, reference to arguably rep-!l1esentative classical and medieval 1 authors, tracing of the word 'being ioonsidered through t1he documents of Vatican II, con- 'sideration of 1appearance of the word in other Church documents, cross-reference to other uses of the word within Huma,nae Vitae itself, and reference to the Italian" 1 original." 1 l In preparation for this article reference was made to six English translations : (a) the translation done by the NC News Service, made widely available by the Daughters of Saint Paul, Of Human Life (Boston, Mass.: Daughters of St. Paul, 1968), hereafter referred to as the "usual translation" and designated by HY; (b) the translation by the Catholic Truth Society printed in John Horgan, Humanae Vitae and the Bishops (Shannon, Ireland: Irish University Press, 1972), 33-53; this translation was modified and reprinted in (c) The Pope Speaks 13 (1969): 329-346, and in (d) the Vatican Press Office translation, " Encyclical Letter on the Regulation of Births " in Vatican II: More Post-Conciliar Doauments, ed. Austin Flannery, O.P. (Northport, N. Y.: Costello Publishing Company, 1982), 397-416; (e) the translation by Rev. Marc Calegari, S.J., Humanae Vitae (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1978), which has undergone a further, as of yet unpublished, revision. 'There is one translation (f) that was made entirely from the Latin, by Rev. A. J. Durand, Humanae Vitae: A New Translation (Bethlehem, Pa.: Catechetical Communications; no date given); it is, though, not widely available. Rev. Calegari, in private communication with this author, noted that the document was originally written in Italian, though the Latin text is the official text. He also stated that the modern language versions were made from the Italian text. My comparisons of the translations of Humanae Vitae with the Italian and the Latin versions indicate that Rev. Calegari is correct in saying that most modern versions are based on the Italian, though a few, most notably that by the Catholic Truth Society, have clearly made reference to the... (shrink)

An important aspect of the developmental maturation of lymphocytes is their capacity to locate and enter lymphoid organs with great rapidity and specificity and to follow certain routes within these organs for the attainment of particular immunological capabilities. It is now known that this “homing response” to lymphoid organs involves specific glycoprotein receptors on the lymphocyte cell surface. The biochemistry of these receptors and their significance in normal and pathological immune responses are discussed.

Philosophers have long been fascinated by the stream of consciousness––thoughts, images, and bits of inner speech that dance across the inner stage. Yet for centuries, such “mind-wandering” was deemed private and thus resistant to empirical investigation. Recent developments in psychology and neuroscience have reinvigorated scientific interest in the stream of thought, leading some researchers to dub this “the era of the wandering mind”. Despite this flurry of progress, scientists have stressed that mind-wandering research requires firmer philosophical foundations. The time is (...) therefore ripe for the philosophy of mind-wandering. Our review begins with a foundational question: what is mind-wandering? We then investigate the significance of mind-wandering for general philosophical topics, namely mental action, introspection, and the norms of thinking and attention. (shrink)

Music, language, and drama come together in opera to make a whole that conveys emotional reality. In this book, Irving Singer develops a new mode for understanding and experiencing the operas of Mozart and Beethoven, approaching them not as a musical technician but as a philosopher concerned with their expressive and mythic elements. Using the distinction between the sensuous and the passionate as framework for his discussion, Singer explores not only the treatment of love in these operas but also (...) the emotional and intellectual orientation of these two great composers. Singer contrasts the cool sensuality of the Don in Mozart's Don Giovanni with Leonora's passionate love for her husband in Beethoven's Fidelio and compares the erotic playfulness of some of Mozart's letters with Beethoven's fervent letter to "the immortal beloved." Don Giovanni, The Marriage of Figaro, Così Fan Tutte, and The Magic Flute all express the conflict between the sensuous and the passionate, but it is only in The Magic Flute, says Singer, that this conflict is resolved. Beethoven, an admirer of The Magic Flute, emulated both its music and its ideology, and produced in Fidelio the greatest of all operas about married love. Written while Singer was also at work on the three-volume The Nature of Love, Mozart and Beethoven can be read as a companion volume to this masterful trilogy and as a forerunner to his later work on philosophy in film. (shrink)

Although mind-wandering occupies up to half of our waking thoughts, it is seldom discussed in philosophy. My paper brings these neglected thoughts into focus. I propose that mind-wandering is unguided attention. Guidance in my sense concerns how attention is monitored and regulated as it unfolds over time. Roughly speaking, someone’s attention is guided if she would feel pulled back, were she distracted from her current focus. Because our wandering thoughts drift unchecked from topic to topic, they are unguided. One motivation (...) for my theory is what I call the “Puzzle of the Purposeful Wanderer”. On the one hand, mind-wandering seems essentially purposeless; almost by definition, it contrasts with goal-directed cognition. On the other hand, empirical evidence suggests that our minds frequently wander to our goals. My solution to the puzzle is this: mind-wandering is purposeless in one way—it is unguided—but purposeful in another—it is frequently caused, and thus motivated, by our goals. Another motivation for my theory is to distinguish mind-wandering from two antithetical forms of cognition: absorption and rumination. Surprisingly, previous theories cannot capture these distinctions. I can: on my view, absorption and rumination are guided, whereas mind-wandering is not. My paper has four parts. Section 1 spells out the puzzle. Sections 2 and 3 explicate two extant views of mind-wandering—the first held by most cognitive scientists, the second by Thomas Metzinger. Section 4 uses the limitations of these theories to motivate my own: mind-wandering is unguided attention. (shrink)

Can we be responsible for our attention? Can attention be epistemically good or bad? Siegel tackles these under‐explored questions in “Selection Effects”, a pathbreaking chapter of The Rationality of Perception. In this chapter, Siegel develops one of the first philosophical accounts of attention norms. Her account is inferential: patterns of attention are often controlled by inferences and therefore subject to rational epistemic norms that govern any other form of inference. Although Siegel’s account is explanatorily powerful, it cannot capture a core (...) attention norm in cognitive science: one should balance between exploratory and exploitative attention. For central cases of exploratory attention such as mind‐wandering, child‐like, and creative thinking are non‐inferential. Siegel’s view classifies them as “normative freebies” that are not subject to epistemic evaluation. We’re therefore left with a disjunctive conclusion: either Siegel’s inferentialist theory of attention norms is incomplete or cognitive scientists are wrong about the norms that govern attention. (shrink)

For more than six decades, and for thousands of students, Introduction to Logic has been the gold standard in introductory logic texts. In this 15th Edition, Carl Cohen and Victor Rodych update Irving M. Copi's classic text, improving on its many strengths and introducing new and helpful material that will greatly assist both students and instructors.

The growth during the 1990s of a republican movement in Australia has stimulated among other things a feminist examination of both the gendered nature of republicanism and the under-representation of women in senior positions in republican organizations. Feminists have adopted several critical perspectives on Australian republicanism: one involves the claim for the redesign of Australian political institutions in order to maximize the representation of women and women's interests; another suggests that the neglected history of women's involvement in constitutional politics during (...) the last century needs to be understood to throw light on ways in which republicanism can be made more meaningful for women now, while a third argues that republicanism is not essentially a feminist issue and should not be pursued as such. The article challenges this conclusion. (shrink)

v. 1. Perakim I, II, II -- v. 2. Perek IV -- v. 3. Perakim V, VI.