This paper examines the discrepancy between the attitudes of many historians of mathematics to sixteenth-century geometry and those of museum curators and others interested in practical mathematics and in instruments. It argues for the need to treat past mathematical practice, not in relation to timeless criteria of mathematical worth, but according to the agenda of the period. Three examples of geometrical activity are used to illustrate this, and two particular contexts are presented in which mathematical practice localised in the sixteenth (...) century takes on a special historical significance. (shrink)

Large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT or Google’s Bard have shown significant performance on a variety of text-based tasks, such as summarization, translation, and even the generation of new...

Contemporary universities are engaged in multiple activities, which are often disconnected and subject to powerful external influences. Undergraduate research projects have been posited as a means of enhancing undergraduate education and improving the integration of research and teaching. However, engagement with the core research activity of the institution is not easily achieved. Greater integration between disparate activities within the university is hindered by the dynamics of the higher education field, pressures on academic staff and students, and funding policies. Expanded undergraduate (...) involvement in externally funded research projects could engender connectivity between disconnected parties and with learning contexts often considered external to the university. (shrink)

A systematic introduction suitable for readers who have little familiarity with logic. Provides numerous examples and complete proofs.

Generative AI programs can produce high-quality written and visual content that may be used for good or ill. We argue that a credit–blame asymmetry arises for assigning responsibility for these outputs and discuss urgent ethical and policy implications focused on large-scale language models.

A new theory of ethnic cleansing based on the most terrible cases and cases of lesser violence. Murderous cleansing is modern, 'the dark side of democracy'. It results where the demos is confused with the ethnos. Danger arises where two rival ethno-national movements each claims 'its own' state over the same territory. Conflict escalates where either the weaker side fights because of aid from outside, or the stronger side believes it can deploy sudden, overwhelming force. Escalation is not simply the (...) work of 'evil elites' or 'primitive peoples'. It results from complex interactions between leaders, militants, and 'core constituencies' of ethno-nationalism. Understanding this complex process helps us devise policies to avoid ethnic cleansing in the future. (shrink)

In 1939, just before graduating from high school in the small town of Ridgeway in northeast Iowa, Everett Kuntz spent his entire savings of $12.50 on a 35mm Argus AF camera. He made a camera case from a worn-out boot, scraps from a tin can, and a clasp from his mother’s purse. For the next several years, especially during the summers when he worked on his parents’ dairy farm, he clicked the shutter of his trusty Argus all around the quiet (...) town. Everett bought movie reel film in bulk from a mail-order house, rolled his own film, and developed it in a closet at home, but he never had the money to print his photographs. More than two thousand negatives stayed in a box while he married, raised a family, and worked as an electrical engineer in the Twin Cities. When he became ill with cancer in the fall of 2002—sixty years after he had developed the last of his bulk film—Everett opened his time capsule and printed the images from his youth. He died in 2003, having brought his childhood town back to life just as he was leaving it. A sense of peace radiates from these images. Whether skinny-dipping in the Turkey River, wheelbarrow-racing, threshing oats, milking cows, visiting with relatives after church, or hanging out at the drugstore or the movies, Ridgeway’s hardworking citizens are modest and trusting and luminous in their graceful harmony and their unguarded affection for each other. Visiting the town in 2006 as he was writing the text to accompany these photographs, Jim Heynen crafted vignettes that perfectly complement these rediscovered images by blending fact and fiction to give context and voice to Ridgeway’s citizens. (shrink)

This paper aims to establish several interconnected points. First, a particular interpretation of the mathematical definition of information, known as the causal interpretation, is supported largely by misunderstandings of the engineering context from which it was taken. A better interpretation, which makes the definition and quantification of information relative to the function of its user, is outlined. The first half of the paper is given over to introducing communication theory and its competing interpretations. The second half explores three consequences of (...) the main thesis. First, a popular claim that the quantification of information in a signal is irrelevant for the meaning of that signal is exposed as fallacious. Second, a popular distinction between causal and semantic information is shown to be misleading, and I argue it should be replaced with a related distinction between natural and intentional signs. Finally, I argue that recent empirical work from microbiology and cognitive science drawing on resources of mathematical communication theory is best interpreted by the functional account. Overall, a functional approach is shown to be both theoretically and empirically well-supported. (shrink)

In November 2022, OpenAI released ChatGPT, an incredibly sophisticated chatbot. Its capability is astonishing: as well as conversing with human interlocutors, it can answer questions about history, explain almost anything you might think to ask it, and write poetry. This level of achievement has provoked interest in questions about whether a chatbot might have something similar to human intelligence or even consciousness. Given that the function of a chatbot is to process linguistic input and produce linguistic output, we consider the (...) question whether a sophisticated chatbot might have inner speech. That is: Might it talk to itself, internally? We explored this via a conversation with ‘Playground’, a chatbot which is very similar to ChatGPT but more flexible in certain respects. We asked it questions which, plausibly, can only be answered if one first produces some inner speech. Here, we present our findings and discuss their philosophical significance. (shrink)

The goal of this paper is to show that the information carried by a structural representation can be decomposed into the information carried by its component parts. In particular, the relations between the components of a structural representation carry quantifiable information about the relations between components of their signifieds. It follows that the information carried by cognitive structural representations, including cognitive maps, can in principle be quantified and decomposed. This is perhaps surprising given that the formal tools of communication theory (...) have typically only been applied to simpler representation-like states without significant structure, such as detectors or indicators. In the final section I consider using computational complexity theory to capture the processing advantages afforded by structural representation. (shrink)

In this paper I will revisit the debate over pornography by doing three things: (a) I will suggest a more sophisticated, two‐dimensional set of distinctions between positons in the debate; (b) I will then go on to attack both libertarians and the group I call “repressive feminists”; and (c) I will conclude by suggesting that by means of Hume's theory of sympathy we could support a limited form of censorship to bring women more fully into our moral and political community. (...) I turn first to the labors of definition. (shrink)

For many of us, entry into motherhood involves an ambiguous visibility and intelligibility, where our acceptance into mainstream spaces as mothers entails a loss of lesbian difference. Mann explores this loss using the work of two philosophers of lesbian difference, Monique Wittig and Judith Butler. She argues that the figure of the lesbian mother is deployed on a broad cultural scale to reinvigorate and renaturaUze the myth of the happy, natural, heterosexual mother.

A key argument of Dixon et al. in the target article is that prejudice reduction through intergroup contact and collective action work in opposite ways. We argue for a complementary approach focusing on extreme emotions to understand why people turn to non-normative collective action and to understand when and under what conditions extreme emotions may influence positive effects of contact on reconciliation.

Choking under pressure describes the phenomenon of people performing well below their expected standard under circumstances where optimal performance is crucial. One of the prevailing explanations for choking is that pressure increases the conscious attention to the underlying processes of the performer's task execution, thereby disrupting what would normally be a relatively automatic process. However, research on choking has focused mainly on the influence of pressure on motor performance, typically overlooking how it might alter the way that vision is controlled (...) when performing these motor actions. In this article we ask whether the visual component of expert motor-skill execution is susceptible to choking much like the motor component is thought to be. To do so, we draw heavily on empirical findings from studies of sporting expertise, in particular focussing on the role of gaze in three types of visually-guided actions: interceptive actions, aiming tasks, and anticipatory skill. For each of these skills we evaluate the nature of the expert advantage, discuss the role of consciousness in their control, examine the potential impact of pressure on task performance, and consider interventions designed to reduce the likelihood of choking when performing these tasks. (shrink)

Prominent views about representation share a premise: that mathematical communication theory is blind to representational content. Here I challenge that premise by rejecting two common misconceptions: that Claude Shannon said that the meanings of signals are irrelevant for communication theory (he didn't and they aren't), and that since correlational measures can't distinguish representations from natural signs, communication theory can't distinguish them either (the premise is true but the conclusion is false; no valid argument can link them).

Why hasn’t the Marx-inspired Left seized upon catastrophic climate change as the basis for reconceiving historical materialism and the contradictions fueling anticapitalist struggle in the twenty-first century? Defining core participants as energy users and abusers, anchored in the opposition to fossil-fueled profit and growth rather than in traditional class conflicts, the struggle to create a postcapitalist energy commons can become the leading edge of a more broadly conceived global struggle for a sustainable and just postcapitalist society. The new global movement (...) will be enabled by technologies of green energy microproduction, an energy internet for sharing energy on postcapitalist grids, and efforts to create more sustainable community relationships and practices. Catastrophic climate change can become the occasion for reigniting a Marx-inspired sense of transformative agency and solidarity that will enable us to confront transnational capitalism globally and locally in ways that are beyond the imaginative bounds of the current paper. (shrink)

Here is the crucial passage from Proslogion II.

This chapter argues that Abelard understood, incorporated, and in some cases developed more fully an ethical outlook to be found in Augustine’s writings. In characterizing sin as contempt of God, Abelard rejects views that maintain that sin is a vice, or a bad deed, or even the will to perform a bad deed. Sin is precisely the intention to do evil. Abelard thus distinguishes sharply between acting willingly and acting intentionally. The justification for the distinction can be found in the (...) difference between Augustine’s De Libero Arbitrio and his De Sermone Domini in Monte. This chapter explores several ramifications of Abelard’s intentionalism, including the analysis of intention as a kind of consent, differences between intentions and desires, the role of natural law, ignorance, and mistaken belief. (shrink)

We address how the motor system can contribute to the component of smile perception. A smile perceiver can ground the meaning of non-prototypical smiles by interacting with the presenter to maintain the presenter's type of smile. In this case, the meaning of that smile is congruent with the motor behavior that elicits that smile (such as a funny gesture).

This article replies to Lynne Rudder Baker and Gareth B. Matthews’s “Anselm’s Argument Reconsidered,” in which the authors claim to have produced a sound version of Anselm’s ontological argument. Using Gaunilo’s “lost island” counterexample, this article explores the question whether an Anselmian argument can prove the existence of the greatest conceivable being without relying on premises that also prove the existence of the greatest conceivable island. A premise crucial to any such argument is a “greatness principle,” about which there has (...) recently been scholarly disagreement. This article examines two versions: (GP′) If it is in the understanding alone, it can be conceived to exist in reality also, which is greater, and (GP*) If it exists in the understanding alone, that which is greater can be conceived to exist in reality also. A distinctive feature of Baker and Matthews’s approach is that it countenances some “objects of thought” that not only do not exist in reality but logically cannot exist in reality. They then argue that for any conceivable island, a greater island is conceivable, but that there cannot be a conceivable being greater than the greatest conceivable being. Their strategy is vulnerable on two counts. It does not address the possibility that there is no upper limit to greatness in conceivable beings. Nor does it assure us that the greatest conceivable being is even logically possible. Thus their version of Anselm’s argument is inconclusive. (shrink)

This chapter examines Augustine’s two treatises on lying, De Mendacio and Contra Mendacium ad Consentium. Augustine’s differentiation between statements that are lies from those that are not illustrates the importance of a presence of an intention to deceive. His views on lying are compared with views expressed by Bernard Williams. One of the surprising consequences of Augustine’s views is that a person can lie when telling the truth. In spite of some examples that Augustine regards as poignant, he defends the (...) position that all lying is sinful, even when the consequences of lying would be better than the consequences of telling the truth. (shrink)

In the 150 years since Schöll's seminal work, the Prytaneion Decree has been studied frequently. Of the groups of honourees mentioned in the decree, the agonistic victors have received the least attention. Most scholars have simply attributed them, without further discussion, to the sphere of war or to the sphere of religion. In this article, athletics is understood as a sphere of action with its own logic: the passages on athletes in the decree are examined in detail and situated within (...) the debate in classical Athens about whether victors of the Panhellenic Games should be honoured by the polis and to what extent. The strange duplication in the decree, which first regulates honours for agonistic victors in general and, in a second paragraph, honours for hippic victors, is related to some texts that viewed hippic victories more critically than gymnic ones. A precise dating of the decree is not possible, but there were several events in the fifth century that might have created the desire among Athenians for a general regulation of sitêsis for athletes. (shrink)

Using as a guide Pellegrino and Thomasma's end-oriented beneficence model of the virtues in medical practice, the author derives from the cardinal forms of psychiatric treatment a set of virtues particular to this field. Prior work from Jung, Havens and Menzer-Benaron helps to clarify the analysis.

This article considers the status and meaning of the category of value in the wake of the financial crisis that began in 2007. I argue that value is best understood as a form of social wealth constituted by a spatially and temporally generalising social relation of equivalence and substitutability under, and specific to, capitalism ‐ and that a categorial focus shows that despite massive ‘devaluations’, the value-relation is not itself in crisis. On the contrary, it is running at near full (...) capacity, erasing the difference between ‘financial’ and ‘real’ capitals, values, and assets. Consequently, attempts to understand the crisis that rely on material distinctions between ‘real’ and ‘fictitious’ values and capitals overstate the extent and depth of the crisis for capital, and underestimate the virtually uninterrupted consolidation of the rule of the value, i.e. the territorial and historical imperative of equivalence and substitutability. (shrink)