This paper uncovers a much-neglected ambiguity in Kant’s conception of rational religion, namely, a confusion regarding the public communicability of moral faith, which would in turn render faith and knowledge indistinguishable. The few scholars who have noticed this ambiguity pursue its epistemic dimensions, but this paper explores its ramifications for Kant’s claim that coherent moral agency requires religious faith, taking issue with Lawrence Pasternack’s recent interpretation. Once one notices Kant has two methods for distinguishing conviction from persuasion, one is better (...) able to understand the connection he draws between religious conviction and conscientious character, and the corresponding connection between mere persuasion and spurious faith. While Kant does not explicitly acknowledge this parallel, this paper reveals that it is in play across the Kantian corpus, and is especially perspicuous in his analysis of the biblical figures of Job and his comforters. (shrink)

In this paper I analyze the importance of Kant’s account of principled solitude at the end of § 29 of the Third Critique. The scant attention paid to this passage by the scholarship has mistaken it to mean that solitude is a misanthropic attitude, a misreading that serves a prevailing interpretation that Kant elevates communal interaction as the solution to moral turpitude. In reality, Kant holds that solitude can afford an individual liberation from the competitive obsession with others that characterizes (...) vice. Whereas misanthropic recluses withdraw from society out of hatred, fear, or indifference toward people, the virtuous solitary withdraws from their company in order to acquire a morally principled attitude of self-possession. By carefully delineating the development of this view in Kant’s lectures and critical works, as well as by laying out the essence of Kant’s notions of philanthropy and misanthropy, I construct an account of how solitude can perform this philanthropic function. (shrink)

This paper argues for the legitimacy of daydreaming as an important condition of a liberatory political vision, using a Marcusean framework to supplement and extend the critique of productivism recently made by Kathi Weeks. By differentiating free time from mere pastime, I show that daydreaming not only builds our political imagination, but it also reminds us of the value of unproductive free time. Situating Marcuse within a survey of the role of play and leisure in Aristotle, Schiller, and Marx, I (...) show how Marcuse’s theory integrates neglected historical possibilities for reconceptualizing leisure as a right and not a luxury. (shrink)

The main purpose of this paper is to bring out some significant humanistic characteristics of Chinese religious thought. My account is limited to what is originally and typically Chinese. That is to say, it will exclude what has been influenced by Buddhism from India or Christianity from the Western world. Some of the theses of this paper are based on scholarly works, while others are drawn from the author's primary experience.

What must the United States do to remain the global superpower and stop alienating the rest of the world? The author of the bestselling "The Paradox of American Power" has one clear answer: soft power.

Yoga has come to be an icon of Indian culture and civilization, and it is widely regarded as being timeless and unchanging. Based on extensive ethnographic research and an analysis of both ancient and modern texts, Yoga in Modern India challenges this popular view by examining the history of yoga, focusing on its emergence in modern India and its dramatically changing form and significance in the twentieth century. Joseph Alter argues that yoga's transformation into a popular activity idolized for (...) its health value is based on modern ideas about science and medicine. Alter centers his analysis on an interpretation of the seminal work of Swami Kuvalayananda, one of the chief architects of the Yoga Renaissance in the early twentieth century. From this point of orientation he explores current interpretations of yoga and considers how practitioners of yogic medicine and fitness combine the ideas of biology, physiology, and anatomy with those of metaphysics, transcendence, and magical power. The first serious ethnographic history of modern yoga in India, this fluently written book is must reading not only for students and scholars but also practitioners who seek a deeper understanding of how yoga developed over time into the exceedingly popular phenomenon it is today. (shrink)

In this volume, Joseph Catalano offers an in-depth exploration of Jean-Paul Sartre's four major philosophical writings: Being and Nothingness, Saint Genet: Actor and Martyr, The Critique of Dialectical Reason, and The Family Idiot. These works have been immensely influential, but they are long and difficult and thus challenging for both students and scholars. Catalano here demonstrates the interrelation of these four works, their internal logic, and how they provide insights into important but overlooked aspects of Sartre's thought, such as (...) the body, childhood, and evil. The book begins with Sartre's final work, The Family Idiot, and systematically works backward to Being and Nothingness. Catalano then repeats the study by advancing chronologically, beginning with Being and Nothingness and ending with The Family Idiot and an afterword on Flaubert's Madame Bovary. Readers will appreciate Catalano's subtle readings as well as the new insights that he brings to Sartre's oeuvre. (shrink)

In dynamic epistemic logic and other fields, it is natural to consider relativization as an operator taking sentences to sentences. When using the ideas and methods of dynamic logic, one would like to iterate operators. This leads to iterated relativization. We are also concerned with the transitive closure operation, due to its connection to common knowledge. We show that for three fragments of the logic of iterated relativization and transitive closure, the satisfiability problems are fi1 11–complete. Two of these fragments (...) do not include transitive closure. We also show that the question of whether a sentence in these fragments has a finite (tree) model is fi0 01–complete. These results go via reduction to problems concerning domino systems. (shrink)

It is time for a new paper about open questions in the currently very active area of randomness and computability. Ambos-Spies and Kučera presented such a paper in 1999 [1]. All the question in it have been solved, except for one: is KL-randomness different from Martin-Löf randomness? This question is discussed in Section 6.Not all the questions are necessarily hard—some simply have not been tried seriously. When we think a question is a major one, and therefore likely to be hard, (...) we indicate this by the symbol ▶, the criterion being that it is of considerable interest and has been tried by a number of researchers. Some questions are close contenders here; these are marked by ▷. With few exceptions, the questions are precise. They mostly have a yes/no answer. However, there are often more general questions of an intuitive or even philosophical nature behind. We give an outline, indicating the more general questions.All sets will be sets of natural numbers, unless otherwise stated. These sets are identified with infinite strings over {0, 1}. Other terms used in the literature are sequence and real. (shrink)

In two recent papers Perez Laraudogoitia has described a variety of supertasks involving elastic collisions in Newtonian systems containing a denumerably infinite set of particles. He maintains that these various supertasks give examples of systems in which energy is not conserved, particles at rest begin to move spontaneously, particles disappear from a system, and particles are created ex nihilo. An analysis of these supertasks suggests that they involve systems that do not satisfy the mathematical conditions required of Newtonian systems at (...) the time the supertask is due to be completed, or else they rely on the application of the time-reversal transformation to states which are not well-defined. Consequently, it is unjustified to conclude that the paradoxical results are arising from within the framework of Newtonian mechanics. In the last part of this article, we discuss various aspects of the physics of these supertasks. (shrink)

It is hard to think of two philosophers less alike than St. Thomas Aquinas and Jean-Paul Sartre. Aquinas, a thirteenth-century Dominican friar, and Sartre, a twentieth-century philosopher and atheist, are separated by both time and religious beliefs. Yet, for philosopher Joseph S. Catalano, the two are worth bringing together for their shared concern with a fundamental issue: the uniqueness of each individual person and how this uniqueness relates to our mutual dependence on each other. When viewed in the context (...) of one another, Sartre broadens and deepens Aquinas’s outlook, updating it for our present planetary and social needs. Both thinkers, as Catalano shows, bring us closer to the reality that surrounds us, and both are centrally concerned with the place of the human within a temporal realm and what stance we should take on our own freedom to act and live within that realm. Catalano shows how freedom, for Sartre, is embodied, and that this freedom further illuminates Aquinas’s notion of consciousness. ​ Compact and open to readers of varying backgrounds, this book represents Catalano’s efforts to bring a lifetime of work on Sartre into an accessible consideration of philosophical questions by placing him in conversation with Aquinas, and it serves as a primer on key ideas of both philosophers. By bringing together these two figures, Catalano offers a fruitful space for thinking through some of the central questions about faith, conscience, freedom, and the meaning of life. (shrink)

The author of Governance in a Globalizing World probes the limits of American power, offering a compelling argument for the world's lone superpower to forge cooperative relationships with nations around the world.

Behavioral scientists routinely publish broad claims about human psychology and behavior in the world's top journals based on samples drawn entirely from Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic (WEIRD) societies. Researchers – often implicitly – assume that either there is little variation across human populations, or that these “standard subjects” are as representative of the species as any other population. Are these assumptions justified? Here, our review of the comparative database from across the behavioral sciences suggests both that there is (...) substantial variability in experimental results across populations and that WEIRD subjects are particularly unusual compared with the rest of the species – frequent outliers. The domains reviewed include visual perception, fairness, cooperation, spatial reasoning, categorization and inferential induction, moral reasoning, reasoning styles, self-concepts and related motivations, and the heritability of IQ. The findings suggest that members of WEIRD societies, including young children, are among the least representative populations one could find for generalizing about humans. Many of these findings involve domains that are associated with fundamental aspects of psychology, motivation, and behavior – hence, there are no obviousa priorigrounds for claiming that a particular behavioral phenomenon is universal based on sampling from a single subpopulation. Overall, these empirical patterns suggests that we need to be less cavalier in addressing questions ofhumannature on the basis of data drawn from this particularly thin, and rather unusual, slice of humanity. We close by proposing ways to structurally re-organize the behavioral sciences to best tackle these challenges. (shrink)

An anthropological perspective on biosemiosis raises important questions about sociality, ecology and communication in contexts that encompass many different forms of life. As such, these questions are important for understanding the problem of religion in relation to social theory, as well as understanding our collective, biosocial animal history and the development of human culture, as an articulation of power, on an evolutionary time scale. The argument presented here is that biosemiotics provides a framework for extending Talal Asad’s genealogical critique of (...) religion to culture more broadly, providing an important perspective on power in relation to communication and in relation to the ‘supernatural’ attributes of language in a multi-species environment of signs and sign relationships. (shrink)

We call A weakly low for K if there is a c such that $K^A(\sigma)\geq K(\sigma)-c$ for infinitely many σ; in other words, there are infinitely many strings that A does not help compress. We prove that A is weakly low for K if and only if Chaitin's Ω is A-random. This has consequences in the K-degrees and the low for K (i.e., low for random) degrees. Furthermore, we prove that the initial segment prefix-free complexity of 2-random reals is infinitely (...) often maximal. This had previously been proved for plain Kolmogorov complexity. (shrink)

The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of the City is an outstanding reference source to this exciting subject and the first collection of its kind. Comprising 40 chapters by a team of international contributors, the Handbook is divided into clear sections addressing the following central topics: -/- • Historical Philosophical Engagements with Cities -/- • Modern and Contemporary Philosophical Theories of the City -/- • Urban Aesthetics -/- • Urban Politics -/- • Citizenship -/- • Urban Environments and the Creation/Destruction of (...) Place. -/- The concluding section, Urban Engagements, contains interviews with philosophers discussing their engagement with students and the wider public on issues and initiatives including experiential learning, civic and community engagement, disability rights and access, environmental degradation, professional diversity, social justice, and globalization. -/- Essential reading for students and researchers in environmental philosophy, aesthetics, and political philosophy, The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of the City is also a useful resource for those in related fields, such as geography, urban studies, sociology, and political science. (shrink)

We show that the Turing degrees are not sufficient to measure the complexity of continuous functions on [0, 1]. Computability of continuous real functions is a standard notion from computable analysis. However, no satisfactory theory of degrees of continuous functions exists. We introduce the continuous degrees and prove that they are a proper extension of the Turing degrees and a proper substructure of the enumeration degrees. Call continuous degrees which are not Turing degrees non-total. Several fundamental results are proved: a (...) continuous function with non-total degree has no least degree representation, settling a question asked by Pour-El and Lempp; every non-computable f $\epsilon \mathcal{C}[0, 1]$ computes a non-computable subset of $\mathbb{N}$ ; there is a non-total degree between Turing degrees $a _\eqslantless_{\tau}$ b iff b is a PA degree relative to a; $\mathcal{S} \subseteq 2^{\mathbb{N}}$ is a Scott set iff it is the collection of f-computable subsets of $\mathbb{N}$ for some f $\epsilon \mathcal{C}[O, 1]$ of non-total degree; and there are computably incomparable f, g $\epsilon \mathcal{C}[0, 1]$ which compute exactly the same subsets of $\mathbb{N}$ . Proofs draw from classical analysis and constructive analysis as well as from computability theory. (shrink)

We study reals with infinitely many incompressible prefixes. Call $A \in 2^{\omega}$ Kolmogorot random if $(\exists^{\infty}n) C(A \upharpoonright n) \textgreater n - \mathcal{O}(1)$ , where C denotes plain Kolmogorov complexity. This property was suggested by Loveland and studied by $Martin-L\ddot{0}f$ , Schnorr and Solovay. We prove that 2-random reals are Kolmogorov random. Together with the converse-proved by Nies. Stephan and Terwijn [11]-this provides a natural characterization of 2-randomness in terms of plain complexity. We finish with a related characterization of 2-randomness.

As the journal is effectively defunct, I am uploading a full-text copy, but only of my abstract and article, and some journal front matter. -/- Note that the pagination in the PDF version differs from the official pagination because A4 and 8.5" x 11" differ. -/- Traditionally, imperatives have been handled with deontic logics, not the logic of propositions which bear truth values. Yet, an imperative is issued by the speaker to cause (stay) actions which change the state of affairs, (...) which is, in turn, described by propositions that bear truth values. Thus, ultimately, imperatives affect truth values. In this paper, we put forward an idea that allows us to reason with imperatives using classical logic by constructing a one-to-one correspondence between imperatives and a particular class of declaratives. (shrink)

Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason ranks with Being and Nothingness as a work of major philosophical significance, but it has been largely neglected. The first volume, published in 1960, was dismissed as a Marxist work at a time when structuralism was coming into vogue; the incomplete second volume has only recently been published in France. In this commentary on the first volume, Joseph S. Catalano restores the Critique to its deserved place among Sartre’s works and within philosophical discourse as (...) a whole. Sartre attempts one of the most needed tasks of our times, Catalano asserts—the delivery of history into the hands of the average person. Sartre’s concern in the Critique is with the historical significance of everyday life. Can we, he asks, as individuals or even collectively, direct the course of our history? A historical context for our lives is given to us at birth, but we sustain that context with even our most mundane actions—buying a newspaper, waiting in line, eating a meal. In looking at history, Sartre argues, reason can never separate the historical situation of the investigator from the investigation. Thus reason falls into a dialectic, always depending upon the past for guidance but always being reshaped by the present. Clearly showing the influence of Marx on Sartre’s thought, the Critique adds the historical dimension lacking in Being and Nothingness. In placing the Critique within the corpus of Sartre’s philosophical writings, Catalano argues that it represents a development rather than a break from Sartre’s existentialist phase. Catalano has organized his commentary to follow the Critique and has supplied clear examples and concrete expositions of the most difficult ideas. He explicates the dialogue between Marx and Sartre that is internal to the text, and he also discusses Sartre’s Search for Method, which is published separately from the Critique in English editions. (shrink)

We examine the Dual Ramsey Theorem and two related combinatorial principles VW(k,l) and OVW(k,l) from the perspectives of reverse mathematics and effective mathematics. We give a statement of the Dual Ramsey Theorem for open colorings in second order arithmetic and formalize work of Carlson and Simpson [1] to show that this statement implies ACA 0 over RCA 0 . We show that neither VW(2,2) nor OVW(2,2) is provable in WKL 0 . These results give partial answers to questions posed by (...) Friedman and Simpson [3]. (shrink)

A version of nonstandard analysis, Internal Set Theory, has been used to provide a resolution of Zeno's paradoxes of motion. This resolution is inadequate because the application of Internal Set Theory to the paradoxes requires a model of the world that is not in accordance with either experience or intuition. A model of standard mathematics in which the ordinary real numbers are defined in terms of rational intervals does provide a formalism for understanding the paradoxes. This model suggests that in (...) discussing motion, only intervals, rather than instants, of time are meaningful. The approach presented here reconciles resolutions of the paradoxes based on considering a finite number of acts with those based on analysis of the full infinite set Zeno seems to require. The paper concludes with a brief discussion of the classical and quantum mechanics of performing an infinite number of acts in a finite time. (shrink)

The rapidly changing field of genetics affects society through advances in health-care and through implications of genetic research. This study addresses the impacts of new genetic discoveries and technologies on different segments of today's society. The book begins with a chapter on genetic complexity, and subsequent chapters discuss moral and ethical questions arising from today's genetics from the perspectives of health care professionals, the media, the general public, special interest groups and commercial interests.

Demonstrates that the "paradoxes of material implication" are only apparent, sticking entirely within the confines of classical logic.

Discusses the methods of moral reasoning, the evaluation of moral arguments, nuclear war theory, the policy of nuclear deterrence, and the effect of nuclear weapons on nonnuclear powers.

This has been made available gratis by the publisher. -/- This piece gives the raison d'etre for the development of the converters mentioned in the title. Three reasons are given, one linguistic, one philosophical, and one practical. It is suggested that at least /two/ independent converters are needed. -/- This piece ties together the extended paper "Abstracts from Logical Form I/II," and the short piece providing the comprehensive theory alluded to in the abstract of that extended paper in "Pragmatics, Montague, (...) and 'Abstracts from Logical Form'" by motivating the entire project from beginning to end. (shrink)

See the abstract for the "Abstracts from Logical Form II".

As the journal is effectively defunct, I am uploading a full-text copy, but only of my abstract and article, and some journal front matter. -/- Note that the pagination in the PDF version differs from the official pagination because A4 and 8.5" x 11" differ. -/- Note also that this is not a mere repetition of the argument in /Mind/, nor merely an application of it; there are subtle differences. -/- Finally, although Christians are likely to take this as applicable (...) to a God who can enter time, Jewish readers who wish a full understanding of its intent are referred to M.R. II:13:3. Note that /some/ free will, however miniscule, must remain, exactly as argued. Also, Maimonides speaks differently, albeit metaphorically, elsewhere, and nothing here contradicts his statements. (shrink)