A computational model of inference during story comprehension is presented, in which story situations are represented distributively as points in a high‐dimensional “situation‐state space.” This state space organizes itself on the basis of a constructed microworld description. From the same description, causal/temporal world knowledge is extracted. The distributed representation of story situations is more flexible than Golden and Rumelhart's [Discourse Proc 16 (1993) 203] localist representation.A story taking place in the microworld corresponds to a trajectory through situation‐state space. During the (...) inference process, world knowledge is applied to the story trajectory. This results in an adjusted trajectory, reflecting the inference of propositions that are likely to be the case. Although inferences do not result from a search for coherence, they do cause story coherence to increase. The results of simulations correspond to empirical data concerning inference, reading time, and depth of processing.An extension of the model for simulating story retention shows how coherence is preserved during retention without controlling the retention process. Simulation results correspond to empirical data concerning story recall and intrusion. (shrink)

Each annual Ontology Summit initiative makes a statement appropriate to each Summit’s theme as part of our general advocacy designed to bring ontology science and engineering into the mainstream. The theme this year is "Towards an Open Ontology Repository". This communiqué represents the joint position of those who were engaged in the year's summit discourse on an Open Ontology Repository (OOR) and of those who endorse below. In this discussion, we have agreed that an "ontology repository is a facility where (...) ontologies and related information artifacts can be stored, retrieved and managed." -/- We believe in the promise of semantic technologies based on logic, databases and the Semantic Web, a Web of exposed data and of interpretations of that data (i.e., of semantics), using common standards. Such technologies enable distinguishable, computable, reusable, and sharable meaning of Web and other artifacts, including data, documents, and services. We also believe that making that vision a reality requires additional supporting resources and these resources should be open, extensible, and provide common services over the ontologies. (shrink)

Der Sammelband vereint Beitrage, die dem Andenken an den Philosophiehistoriker Thomas Ricklin gewidmet sind und an dessen Arbeit anschlieaen. Die Texte befassen sich mit der Erforschung der Philosophie- und Kulturgeschichte des Mittelalters, der Renaissance und der Fruhen Neuzeit und bieten ein Panorama der verschiedenen Dimensionen dessen, was Weisheit und Philosophie in diesen Epochen bedeuteten. Im Zentrum stehen Dante und Boccaccio, wobei insbesondere deren Lehre vom "Schleier" der poetischen Sprache, unter dem die Wahrheit verhullt sei, in einer Reihe von Studien untersucht (...) wird. In diesem Kontext widmen sich weitere Beitrage den Konzepten einiger der wichtigsten Denker des Mittelalters, wie Boethius von Dacien, Roger Bacon, Johannes von Wales, Meister Eckhart und Pietro d'Abano, dessen "Differentia prima" hier zum ersten Mal in einer kritischen Edition vorgelegt wird. Auaerdem wird die Uberlieferung und Auslegung der antiken Exempla als viel zu lange vernachlassigter Teil der Philosophiegeschichte in den Fokus geruckt. Des Weiteren thematisieren die Beitrage Autoren und Texte, die philosophische Fragen verhandeln, ohne den paradigmatischen Formen des Kommentars oder der Summa zugerechnet werden zu konnen, weil sie Sprach- und Genregrenzen uberschreiten, wie Giordano da Pisa, Jodocus Eichmann und Henry More. Weitere Beitrage, die sich mit Philosophinnen und Historikerinnen der Renaissance und Fruhen Neuzeit beschaftigen, verschaffen den weiblichen Stimmen in von Mannern dominierten Diskursen Gehor. (shrink)

A transcript of Leo Strauss’s key seminars on Plato’s Protagoras. This book offers a transcript of Strauss’s seminar on Plato’s Protagoras taught at the University of Chicago in the spring quarter of 1965, edited and introduced by renowned scholar Robert C. Bartlett. These lectures have several important features. Unlike his published writings, they are less dense and more conversational. Additionally, while Strauss regarded himself as a Platonist and published some work on Plato, he published little on individual dialogues. In these (...) lectures Strauss treats many of the great Platonic and Straussian themes: the difference between the Socratic political science or art and the Sophistic political science or art of Protagoras; the character and teachability of virtue, its relation to knowledge, and the relations among the virtues, courage, justice, moderation, and wisdom; the good and the pleasant; frankness and concealment; the role of myth; and the relation between freedom of thought and freedom of speech. In these lectures, Strauss examines Protagoras and the sophists, providing a detailed discussion of Protagoras as it relates to Plato’s other dialogues and the work of modern thinkers. This book should be of special interest to students both of Plato and of Strauss. (shrink)

Using state-of-the-art observational datasets and results from a large archive of computer model simulations, a consortium of scientists from 12 different institutions has resolved a long-standing conundrum in climate science—the apparent discrepancy between simulated and observed temperature trends in the tropics. Research published by this group indicates that there is no fundamental discrepancy between modeled and observed tropical temperature trends when one accounts for: the uncertainties in observations; and the statistical uncertainties in estimating trends from observations. These results refute a (...) recent claim that model and observed tropical temperature trends “disagree to a statistically significant extent”. This claim was based on the application of a flawed statistical test and the use of older observational datasets. (shrink)

Immer öfter werden der Natur eigene Rechte zugesprochen. Rund um den Globus helfen sie gefährdeten Ökosystemen, sich gegen schädliche Wirtschaftsinteressen zu verteidigen. Seit ihrer Einführung in die ecuadorianische Verfassung im Jahre 2008 wurden Rechte der Natur unter anderem in Bolivien, Kanada, Kolumbien, Neuseeland und den USA eingeführt. Zuletzt in Spanien zum Schutz einer Salzwasserlagune. Dieses Buch zeigt, wie die Idee der Rechte der Natur entstand, wie sie immer mehr an Fahrt aufnahm und wie sie uns künftig helfen kann, die Natur (...) und gefährdete Ökosysteme zu schützen. Dabei begibt es sich auf die Reise durch verschiedene Länder und Kontinente und stellt konkrete Anwendungsfälle und Initiativen vor. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Crisis of Meaning in Sartor Resartus—Thomas Carlyle's Pioneering Work in Articulating and Addressing the Existential ConfrontationFrank Martelawhat i call an "existential confrontation" is the encounter with the possibility that human life is absurd: created for no purpose and devoid of any lasting value or meaning. It is "the hour of terror at the world's vast meaningless grinding" that William James (Will to Believe 173) examines, described by Todd May (...) (xi) as "the confrontation of our need for meaning with the unwillingness of the Universe to yield it to us." This confrontation with the existential void and the potential absurdity of human existence is often not just an intellectual dilemma, but felt as a deep personal crisis accompanied by melancholia, angst, nausea, or even suicidal thoughts. Young William James confessed in a letter to a friend that "all last winter" he "was on the continual verge of suicide" (quoted in Gunnarsson), writing later that "too much questioning" leads "to the edge of the slope" wherein lies "nightmare or suicidal view of life" (James, "Is Life Worth Living?" 6). Similarly, Leo Tolstoy (54) reports how his inability to identify a lasting meaning of life drove him to a "state of lunacy" where "the best I could do was to hang myself."Despite a few earlier allusions—most famously the Book of Ecclesiastes proclaiming that "all is vanity and a striving after wind," and Shakespeare's Macbeth lamenting that life is "a tale told by an idiot … signifying nothing"—the existential confrontation is predominantly a modern phenomenon (Martela, A Wonderful Life). The modern history of descriptions of existential confrontations start at the turn of the nineteenth century, and includes Søren Kierkegaard's Sickness Unto Death, Leo Tolstoy's A Confession, Fyodor Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground, Camus's Outsider, Sartre's Nausea, and T. S.Eliot's The Waste Land.There are many responses that the confrontation with the existential void has generated. Sartre embraced the lack of values imposed from outside and [End Page 80] emphasized human freedom. Human beings are "cast into this world … condemned to be free" without any "luminous realm of values" providing "justification or excuse," as Sartre famously summarized in "Existentialism Is a Humanism" (29). Other responses range from Søren Kierkegaard's leap of faith and William James's will to believe to Albert Camus's happiness from absurdity.While some of the responses end up finding a new way of connecting with God and faith, and others are explicitly atheistic, embracing the "death of God," a common thread in most responses is an acknowledgment of the situatedness of human experience and an emphasis placed on human subjectivity and the opportunity to live one's life more authentically. While existentialism, broadly conceived, is often seen as the central philosophical tradition dealing with the existential void, the confrontation was very much alive in the United States as well, visible in both literature and philosophy. As already alluded, William James had an existential confrontation in his youth, writing about the topic in "Is Life Worth Living" and other essays in Will to Believe. There has also been much back-and-forth between Europe and the United States around these themes, with the influences crossing the Atlantic on many occasions. For example, William James cites Thomas Carlyle in Will to Believe, while Sartre cites William James in Nausea, when discussing themes related to the existential confrontation. Similarly, Emerson inspired Nietzsche who inspired Josiah Royce. Typically, the histories tracing the early encounters with the existential confrontation acknowledge Friedrich Nietzsche, Søren Kierkegaard, and Fyodor Dostoevsky as key nineteenth-century predecessors to Existentialism, as all faced directly the question of the meaning of life and the dreadful possibility that life might not have any meaning or value to it.However, there is a key author usually not mentioned in these histories, despite the fact that he played a pivotal role in introducing existentialist themes to the English-speaking audience, coining the phrase "meaning of life" in the English language. Thus, in writing the prehistory of Existentialism, we need to examine Thomas Carlyle and his Sartor Resartus, which has been described by literary historians as "one of... (shrink)

Professor Eric A. Havelock in his book The Liberal Temper in Greek Politics approaches classical political philosophy from the positivistic point of view. The doctrine to which he adheres is however a somewhat obsolete version of positivism. Positivist study of society, as he understands it, is "descriptive" and opposed to "judgmental evaluation" but this does not prevent his siding with those who understand "History as Progress." The social scientist cannot speak of progress unless value judgments can be objective. The up-to-date (...) or consistent positivist will therefore refrain from speaking of progress and instead speak of change. Similarly Havelock appears to accept the distinction between primitive men or savages and civilized men, whereas the consistent positivist will speak not of savages but of pre-literate men and assert that preliterate men have "civilizations" or "cultures" neither superior nor inferior to those of literate men. It would be wrong to believe that the up-to-date positivist is entirely consistent or that his careful avoidance of "evaluative" terms is entirely due to his methodological puritanism; his heart tells him that once one admits the inequality of "cultures," one may not be able to condemn colonialism on moral grounds. Havelock is therefore perhaps only more intelligent or more frank than the consistent positivists when he describes his position as liberal rather than as positivist. Yet this does not entirely dispose of the difficulty. "For the liberals man is to be taken as you find him and therefore his present political institutions are to be taken as given also." This means that here and now the liberals will take American democracy as given and will then "concentrate empirically and descriptively on this kind of political mechanism." This is a fair description of positivistic political science at its best. Yet Havelock praises the same liberals for writing "in defence of democracy". What then is a liberal? Was a German social scientist who in 1939 took "the present political institutions as given" and subjected them to "empirical analysis" for this reason by itself a liberal? If so then a liberal is not a man of strong moral or political convictions, and this does not seem to agree with the common meaning of the word. Yet from Havelock's Preface it appears that the liberal regards all political and moral convictions as "negotiable" because he is extremely tolerant. Havelock applies the implicit maxim of conduct to the relations between the United States and Soviet Russia today. For all one can know from his book, he would have given the same advice during the conflict between the Western democracies and the Fascist regimes at the time of the Munich conference. At any rate he does not seem to have given thought to the question of whether Tolerance can remain tolerant when confronted with unqualified Intolerance or whether one must not fall back in the end on "moral convictions" which are not "negotiable." In almost all these points Havelock is liberal in the sense in which the word is commonly used here and now. (shrink)

The English critic Bentley first proposed emending the transmitted text of Troades 1109 from teget, the reading of all manuscripts, to leget. Bentley's suggestion subsequently gained wide acceptance and was printed in many later editions of the tragedies, including those of Leo , Richter , and Moricca . More recent critics have favoured retention of the manuscript reading. Carlsson, for example, underlines the distinctive alliterative quality which the reading teget imparts to the line; and the latest commentator on the Troades (...) has produced a spirited defence of the transmitted text: Andromache has not yet realized the condition of the corpse, and is thinking, not of gathering up fragmented limbs, but merely of the formal requirements of burial. What Carlsson defends on grounds of alliteration should be retained on grounds of sense: teget tumuloque tradet is a doublet of which the second part makes clear the religious meaning of the first, more general, word. (shrink)

Leo Strauss and Eric Voegelin were political theorists of the first rank whose impact on the study of political science in North America has been profound. A study of their writings is one of the most expeditious ways to explore the core of political science; comparing and contrasting the positions both theorists have taken in assessing that core provides a comprehensive appreciation of the main options of the Western tradition. In fifty-three recently discovered letters, Strauss and Voegelin explore the nature (...) of their similarities and differences, offering trenchant observations about one another's work, about the state of the discipline, and about the influences working on them. The correspondence fleshes out many assumptions made in their published writings, often with a frankness and directness that removes all vestiges of ambiguity. Included with the correspondence are four pivotal re-published essays—"Jerusalem and Athens: Some Preliminary Reflections", "The Gospel and Culture", "Immortality: Experience and Symbol", and "The Mutual Influence of Theology and Philosophy" —and commentaries by James L. Wiser, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Stanley Rosen, Thomas J. J. Altizer, Timothy Fuller, Ellis Sandoz, Thomas L. Pangle, and David Walsh. (shrink)

One of the key ethical debates in Russian religious thought, initiated by Leo Tolstoy, concerned the question of nonresistance to evil by force. The purpose of this article is to assess the influence of Kant’s ethics and philosophy of religion on the course of this debate and to determine the place and significance of the arguments and considerations expressed on this issue by Semyon Frank in the early and late periods (1908 and 1940s) of his work. To this end (...) I reconstruct the general course of the debate, notably the positions and arguments of Leo Tolstoy, Vladimir Solovyov, Ivan Ilyin and Nikolai Berdyaev. Beginning with Tolstoy, Russ­ian thinkers introduced the original ethical content of the idea of nonresistance derived from the Gospel into the ethics of duty borrowed from Kant. The Tolstoy version of this idea was challenged mainly from two directions: from the Kantian grounding of the legitimacy of coercion and attempts to bring in styles of moral thinking other than the ethic of duty. Ilyin’s apolo­gia for the use of force in the struggle against evil prompted Russian émigré thinkers to take a closer look at Tolstoy’s ethical concept and pay attention to its positive content. On this basis Berdyaev and especially Frank create their version of the Christ-centered ethic of salvation which, in the perspective of “protecting the world against evil” includes the ethic of duty and links it with the possibility of using force, always a wrongful act, but one justified “in a situation of extreme need”. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:538 BOOK REVIEWS pressing my admiration for his work and for the wealth of sensibility he brings to the interpretation of a most difficult thinker. Anyone who is seriously interested in Wittgenstein's thought on ethics and religion should encounter the mind of Cyril Barrett through this volume. Hendrix College Conway, Arkansas JOHN CHURCHILL Faith and Political Philosophy: The Correspondence Between Leo Strauss and Eric Voegelin, 1934-1964. Trans. and ed. (...) by PETER EMBERLEY and BARRY COOPER. University Park, Penn.: The Penn· sylvania State University Press, 1993. Pp. xxvi + 368. $45.00 (Cloth). Those of us who have followed the development of Leo Strauss's and Eric Voegelin's thought with passionate interest over the years owe a debt of gratitude to Professors Peter Emberley of Carleton University, Ottawa, and Barry Cooper of the University of Calgary for presenting us with yet another opportunity to reflect upon certain well defined aspects of the thinking of these important political philosophers, and to confirm views that we have long held about the cordial relationship that existed between these two men, despite frequent reports to the contrary. Prefaced by an insightful "Introduction" by Emberley and Cooper, which almost constitutes a commentary on the correspondence, Faith and Political Philosophy is divided into three parts. In Part One, the editors present us with their English translation of the fifty-two extant letters (a few letters appear to have been lost) exchanged between Strauss and Voegelin during the years 1934 to 1964. (For the most part, Strauss and Voegelin corresponded with one another in German.) Because Strauss wrote most, if not all, of his letters longhand, the editors inform us that some passages from Strauss's letters were especially difficult to decipher, and that, on occasion, they had to have re· course to German-speaking persons familiar with the German academic idiom of the 1930s and '40s in order to make sense of what was said. Voegelin, it seems, also had trouble decoding Strauss's handwriting, and admits on one occasion to being unable to read the writing or make sense of Strauss's point. By contrast, Voegelin, we are told, was very much easier to transcribe, since his letters, although, on average, longer than Strauss's, were typewritten. Part Two contains four essays, two by each of the philosophers, on the relationship of reason to reve- BOOK REVIEWS 539 lation-a central theme of the letters, a theme that is explicitly addressed in the letters dating from the late 1940s and early 1950s, and tacitly present in much of the remaining correspondence that is of an academic nature. This theme also attracts the attention of all of the commentators in Part Three, and is plainly the source of the title for the book. All four essays are familiar to Strauss-Voegelin scholars, having been published in various venues. And, finally, Part Three is a collection of eight commentaries on the correspondence by recog· nized scholars, some of whom are frankly famous in academic circles and beyond (e.g., H. G. Gadamer, who, for my tastes, should have had more to say about Voegelin). These commentaries are generally of a very high quality, although curiously, given the theme, most of the commentators seem to be more attuned to modern reference points rather than to the ancient ones with which both Strauss and Voegelin were often in dialogue. The effect of this is particularly noticeable with respect to observations made about Voegelin. Voegelin frequently saw himself in debate with the fathers of the early Church (as his piece " The Gospel and Culture " bears witness), and unfortunately this is not obvious from these commentaries. Still, while exploring the im· plications of the positions taken by Strauss and Voegelin in light of their formally published writing, the commentators make many interesting and, ~t times, controversial observations about one or both of the letter-writers. In this brief review, we will limit ourselves to commenting solely on parts One and Three. This said, perhaps we might open with a general observation about the nature of the correspondence as a whole. As one might expect, the content of the correspondence between Strauss and Voegelin is by no means solely academic and... (shrink)

Citing the Lincoln Savings and Loan scandal, the Leo Frank murder trial, and other cases, author William Simon takes a fresh look at the ethics of lawyering.

Bringing continental sensibilities and skill to his project, David Janssens has abandoned the line of defense heretofore used by North American intellectuals to shield Leo Strauss from criticism: Janssens wastes no time trying to prove Strauss was a liberal democrat, frankly admits his atheism, and emphasizes the continuity and European origins of his thought. Nevertheless committed to defending Strauss even at his most vulnerable points, Janssens is compelled to anchor his new defensive position on a misreading of what he calls (...) "an inconspicuous footnote" in Philosophie und Gesetz (1935). (shrink)

Relevant to, and drawing from, a range of disciplines, the chapters in this collection show the diversity, and applicability, of research in Bayesian argumentation.

A theory is usually said to be time reversible if whenever a sequence of states S 1 , S 2 , S 3 is possible according to that theory, then the reverse sequence of time reversed states S 3 T , S 2 T , S 1 T is also possible according to that theory; i.e., one normally not only inverts the sequence of states, but also operates on the states with a time reversal operator T . David Albert and (...) Paul Horwich have suggested that one should not allow such time reversal operations T on states. I will argue that time reversal operations on fundamental states should be allowed. I will furthermore argue that the form that time reversal operations take is determined by the type of fundamental geometric quantities that occur in nature and that we have good reason to believe that the fundamental geometric quantities that occur in nature correspond to irreducible representations of the Lorentz transformations. Finally, I will argue that we have good reason to believe that space-time has a temporal orientation. (shrink)

There exist well‐known conundrums, such as measure‐theoretic paradoxes and problems of contact, which, within the context of classical physics, can be used to argue against the existence of points in space and space‐time. I examine whether quantum mechanics provides additional reasons for supposing that there are no points in space and space‐time.

This unusually accessible account of recent Anglo-American philosophy focuses on how that philosophy has challenged deeply held notions of subjectivity, mind, and language. The book is designed on a broad canvas in which recent arguments are placed in a historical context (in particular they are related to medieval philosophy and German idealism). The author then explores such topics as mental content, moral realism, realism and antirealism, and the character of subjectivity. Much of the book is devoted to an investigation of (...) Donald Davidson's philosophy, and there is also a sustained critique of the position of Richard Rorty. A final chapter defends the realist position against objections from postmodern thought. As a rigorous and historically sensitive account of recent philosophy, this book should enjoy a wide readership among philosophers of many different persuasions, literary theorists, and social scientists who have been influenced by postmodern thought. (shrink)

The two envelope paradox can be dissolved by looking closely at the connection between conditional and unconditional expectation and by being careful when summing an infinite series of positive and negative terms. The two envelope paradox is not another St. Petersburg paradox and that one does not need to ban talk of infinite expectation values in order to dissolve it. The article ends by posing a new puzzle to do with infinite expectations.

“We raised the power of reason, the power of manipulating words, above all other faculties. The written word became our god. We forgot that before words there were actions … that there have always been things beyond words. We forgot that spoken words preceded the written one. We forgot that written form of our letters came from ideographic pictures … that standing behind every letter is an image like an ancient ghost. The image stands for natural movements of the body (...) and other living things.” Frank Herbert. (shrink)

This article provides excerpts and highlights from the insights of twenty global leaders, business executives, and sustainability experts who gathered at the Esalen Institute in California for four days in March 2002 to discuss how to best leverage change toward an environmentally sustainable and socially equitable global economy. The conference topic was sparked by the path-breaking book Natural Capitalism, which outlines an expanded vision of capitalism suitable for the environmental era. The natural capitalism model is qualitatively different from industrial era (...) capitalism in that it counts both humanity and ecosystem services as valid sources of capital in addition to the traditionally recognized sources, financial and manufactured. One early adopter of natural capitalism, CEO of the Atlanta -based carpet tiling company, Interface, shared how increased efficiency and greater employee and customer satisfaction have resulted. Although some of the conference participants forecasted that globalization is likely to bring humanity face-to-face with a planetary-wide environmental, financial, and social crisis, the overall message of this gathering was positive. Through the imaginative implementation of evolutionary and biomimicry design models in the cultural, financial, and economic spheres, novel solutions to global problems already are being discovered, and, if such innovative and solutions-oriented design thinking can spread rapidly enough, humanity may be able to ameliorate-or even obviate-the deleterious effects of globalization. (shrink)

In this article, I attempt to restore the philosophical significance of that nonformalizable, noniterable, “singular’ element of natural language that I call “style.” I begin by critically addressing the exclusion of such instances of natural language by both semantics‐oriented logical analysis and a restricted variation of structuralist linguistics. Despite the obvious advantages – with regard to style – of ”pragmatic“approaches to language, such pragmatism merely returns to rule‐determination in the guise of “normativity.” Although style by definition resists any kind of (...) rule‐determination – whether posed in terms of semantics or intersubjective regulations of speech‐acts – there can be no consideration of language that ignores the persistence of style in natural language. In terms of cognition, any discursive agent understands more than allowed by either semantics or speech‐act theory. I ascribe this element of excessive signification to the role of style. My principal thesis is twofold: (1) a hermeneutic approach (exemplified by Schleiermacher) to literature should reveal the heuristically decisive role played by style in philosophy; and, more radically still, (2) style, in fact, may be crucially determinative of philosophical discourse in general. I suggest that a closer scrutiny of the lesser‐known works of Ludwig Wittgenstein, conventionally regarded as having dreamt of a “philosophy without style,” may consolidate the restoration of style's philosophical import. (shrink)

Unlike some other reproductions of classic texts (1) We have not used OCR(Optical Character Recognition), as this leads to bad quality books with introduced typos. (2) In books where there are images such as portraits, maps, sketches etc We have endeavoured to keep the quality of these images, so they represent accurately the original artefact. Although occasionally there may be certain imperfections with these old texts, we feel they deserve to be made available for future generations to enjoy.

The restructuration of municipalities which has been decided by the Belgian government, is not only a purely technical operatzon but rather, and in the first place, a social problem. The shape and duty-profile of a local authority should not, indeed, be attuned only to fast changing expectations as far as services are concerned, but to consultation and participation as well.Public administration research cannot keep aloof from this debate, but is considerably hampered by the institutional confusion and the insufficient explicitation of (...) the aims of the present reform. A starting-pointcan, however, be found in the mergers of municipalities that were realized in 1964 and in 1970/1971. In 67 of these municipalities an inquiry was held concerning the consequences of the merger, and moreover, in twotest-cases this inquiry grew to a full-scale systematic policy analysis.This research shows that, as a rule, the former municipalities are reasonably represented in the new entity's council, but it also reveals that few efforts are made to give this representation a broader impact along formal or informal participation-channels. Integration of employees has not caused insurmountable problems. However, in large sized municipalities, resulting from mergers, one could notice a drastic increase in municipal personnel, not only with regard to new duties and objectives but to traditional administrative and police duties as well. Such a phenomenon points to the far-reaching changes which a substantial scale-increase provokes in a municipality's structure and policy profile. A large municipality resulting from mergers is no langer a simple sum of component parts, but a completely new entity, wishing to catch up as fast as possible with comparable municipalities that passed through a progressive growth process. Therefore, scale-increase is not only a means of economizing or an intra-administrative matter, but rather a way of creating chances for further development or wealth and well-being. (shrink)