We make comments on some problems Erdős and Hajnal posed in their famous problem list. Let X be a graph on $\omega _1$ with the property that every uncountable set A of vertices contains a finite set s such that each element of $A-s$ is joined to one of the elements of s. Does then X contain an uncountable clique? We prove that both the statement and its negation are consistent. Do there exist circuitfree graphs $\{X_n:n<\omega \}$ on $\omega _1$ (...) such that if $A\in [\omega _1]^{\aleph _1}$, then $\{n<\omega :X_n\cap [A]^2=\emptyset \}$ is finite? We show that the answer is yes under CH, and no under Martin’s axiom. Does there exist $F:[\omega _1]^2\to 3$ with all three colors appearing in every uncountable set, and with no triangle of three colors. We give a different proof of Todorcevic’ theorem that the existence of a $\kappa $ -Suslin tree gives $F:[\kappa ]^2\to \kappa $ establishing $\kappa \not \to [\kappa ]^2_{\kappa }$ with no three-colored triangles. This statement in turn implies the existence of a $\kappa $ -Aronszajn tree. (shrink)

We examine combinatorial aspects and consistency strength properties of almost Ramsey cardinals. Without the Axiom of Choice, successor cardinals may be almost Ramsey. From fairly mild supercompactness assumptions, we construct a model of ZF + ${\neg {\rm AC}_\omega}$ in which every infinite cardinal is almost Ramsey. Core model arguments show that strong assumptions are necessary. Without successors of singular cardinals, we can weaken this to an equiconsistency of the following theories: “ZFC + There is a proper class of regular almost (...) Ramsey cardinals”, and “ZF + DC + All infinite cardinals except possibly successors of singular cardinals are almost Ramsey”. (shrink)

We take up the challenge of developing an international network with capacity to survey the world's scientists on an ongoing basis, providing rich datasets regarding the opinions of scientists and scientific sub-communities, both at a time and also over time. The novel methodology employed sees local coordinators, at each institution in the network, sending survey invitation emails internally to scientists at their home institution. The emails link to a ‘10 second survey’, where the participant is presented with a single statement (...) to consider, and a standard five point Likert scale. In June 2023, a group of 30 philosophers and social scientists invited 20,085 scientists across 30 institutions in 12 countries to participate, gathering 6,807 responses to the statement 'Science has put it beyond reasonable doubt that COVID-19 is caused by a virus'. The study demonstrates that it is possible to establish a global network to quickly ascertain scientific opinion on a large international scale, with high response rate, low opt-out rate, and in a way that allows for significant (perhaps indefinite) repeatability. Measuring scientific opinion in this new way would be a valuable complement to currently available approaches, potentially informing policy decisions and public understanding across diverse fields. (shrink)

We take up the challenge of developing an international network with capacity to survey the world’s scientists on an ongoing basis, providing rich datasets regarding the opinions of scientists and scientific sub-communities, both at a time and also over time. The novel methodology employed sees local coordinators, at each institution in the network, sending survey invitation emails internally to scientists at their home institution. The emails link to a ‘10 second survey’, where the participant is presented with a single statement (...) to consider, and a standard five-point Likert scale. In June 2023, a group of 30 philosophers and social scientists invited 20,085 scientists across 30 institutions in 12 countries to participate, gathering 6,807 responses to the statement Science has put it beyond reasonable doubt that COVID-19 is caused by a virus. The study demonstrates that it is possible to establish a global network to quickly ascertain scientific opinion on a large international scale, with high response rate, low opt-out rate, and in a way that allows for significant (perhaps indefinite) repeatability. Measuring scientific opinion in this new way would be a valuable complement to currently available approaches, potentially informing policy decisions and public understanding across diverse fields. (shrink)

In this remarkably clear and original study of the Tractatus Peter Carruthers has two principal aims. He seeks to make sense of Wittgenstein's metaphysical doctrines, showing how powerful arguments may be deployed in their support. He also aims to locate the crux of the conflict between Wittgenstein's early and late philosophies. This is shown to arise from his earlier commitment to the objectivity of logic and logical relations, which is the true target of attack of his later discussion of rule-following. (...) Within this general framework Dr Carruthers explores a number of themes, including the early Wittgenstein's doctrine of the priority of logic over metaphysics, the nature and purpose of his programme of analysis for ordinary language and the various possible arguments supporting the existence of Simples. He offers many original interpretations and defends them with considerable attention to textual detail, yet the book's clarity and directness will make it accessible to anyone acquainted with the Tractatus. It will be required reading for all serious students of Wittgenstein's philosophy. (shrink)

In 5, Tait identifies a set of reflection principles called equation image-reflection principles which Peter Koellner has shown to be consistent relative to the existence of κ, the first ω-Erdős cardinal 1. Tait also defines a set of reflection principles called equation image-reflection principles; however, Koellner has shown that these are inconsistent when m > 2, but identifies restricted versions of them which he proves consistent relative to κ 2. In this paper, we introduce a new large-cardinal property, the α-reflective (...) cardinals. Their definition is motivated by Tait's remarks on parameters of third or higher order in reflection principles. We prove that if κ is ℶκ + α + 1-supercompact and 0 < α < κ then κ is α-reflective. Furthermore we show that α-reflective cardinals relativize to L, and that if κ exists then the set of cardinals λ < κ, such that λ is α-reflective for all α such that 0 < α < λ, is a stationary subset of κ. We show that an ω-reflective cardinal satisfies some restricted versions of equation image-reflection, as well as all the reflection properties proved consistent in 2. (shrink)

We take up the challenge of developing an international network with capacity to survey the world’s scientists on an ongoing basis, providing rich datasets regarding the opinions of scientists and scientific sub-communities, both at a time and also over time. The novel methodology employed sees local coordinators, at each institution in the network, sending survey invitation emails internally to scientists at their home institution. The emails link to a ‘10 second survey’, where the participant is presented with a single statement (...) to consider, and a standard five-point Likert scale. In June 2023, a group of 30 philosophers and social scientists invited 20,085 scientists across 30 institutions in 12 countries to participate, gathering 6,807 responses to the statement Science has put it beyond reasonable doubt that COVID-19 is caused by a virus. The study demonstrates that it is possible to establish a global network to quickly ascertain scientific opinion on a large international scale, with high response rate, low opt-out rate, and in a way that allows for significant (perhaps indefinite) repeatability. Measuring scientific opinion in this new way would be a valuable complement to currently available approaches, potentially informing policy decisions and public understanding across diverse fields. (shrink)

Throughout the history of the Western world, science has possessed an extraordinary amount of authority and prestige. And while its pedestal has been jostled by numerous evolutions and revolutions, science has always managed to maintain its stronghold as the knowing enterprise that explains how the natural world works: we treat such legendary scientists as Galileo, Newton, Darwin, and Einstein with admiration and reverence because they offer profound and sustaining insight into the meaning of the universe. In The Intelligibility of Nature (...) , Peter Dear considers how science as such has evolved and how it has marshaled itself to make sense of the world. His intellectual journey begins with a crucial observation: that the enterprise of science is, and has been, directed toward two distinct but frequently conflated ends—doing and knowing. The ancient Greeks developed this distinction of value between craft on the one hand and understanding on the other, and according to Dear, that distinction has survived to shape attitudes toward science ever since. Teasing out this tension between doing and knowing during key episodes in the history of science—mechanical philosophy and Newtonian gravitation, elective affinities and the chemical revolution, enlightened natural history and taxonomy, evolutionary biology, the dynamical theory of electromagnetism, and quantum theory—Dear reveals how the two principles became formalized into a single enterprise, science, that would be carried out by a new kind of person, the scientist. Finely nuanced and elegantly conceived, The Intelligibility of Nature will be essential reading for aficionados and historians of science alike. (shrink)

In this paper we argue that awareness comes in degrees, and we propose a novel multi-factor account that spans both subjective experiences and perceptual representations. At the subjective level, we argue that conscious experiences can be degraded by being fragmented, less salient, too generic, or flash-like. At the representational level, we identify corresponding features of perceptual representations—their availability for working memory, intensity, precision, and stability—and argue that the mechanisms that affect these features are what ultimately modulate the degree of awareness. (...) We conclude the paper by demonstrating why the original interpretations of certain empirical findings that apparently pose problems for our account are, in fact, flawed. (shrink)

In the article, I analyze the representation of Blaise Pascal’s thinking that was presented by the German philosopher and theologian Romano Guardini. This author explored Pascal’s philosophy in the 1920s and 1930s when Germany experienced a large wave of interest in Kierkegaard’s thinking, known as the “Kierkegaard Renaissance.” Guardini participated actively in this renaissance but was strongly opposed to using Kierkegaard’s philosophy as an interpretative key for reading Pascal. He was concerned that the fashionable philosophy of Kierkegaard would overshadow Pascal’s (...) intellectual originality. I will try to demonstrate that Guardini did not entirely succeed in resisting the temptation of following popular trends and himself used Kierkegaardian concepts and topics when discussing Pascal’s thought. Thus we encounter in his works a specific image of Pascal that reflects in great measure contemporary intellectual tendencies. (shrink)

Stimulating introduction to the most central and interesting issues in the philosophy of mind. Topics covered include dualism versus the various forms of materialism, personal identity and survival, and the problem of other minds.

Shows that the dialogue in Plato's Phaedo is primarily devoted to presenting Socrates' final defense of the philosophical life against the theoretical and political challenge of religion.

According to Bob Solomon, love is a human emotion, with a complex intentional structure, having its own kind of reasons. I will examine this account, which, in certain respects, tends to mask the deep and important differences between love and other emotions.

I criticize some arguments against the causal interpretability of population genetics put forward by Denis Walsh ([2007], [2010]). In particular, I seek to undermine the contention that population genetics exhibits frame of reference relativity or subjectivity with respect to its formal representations. I also show that classical population genetics does not fall foul of some criteria for causal representation put forward by James Woodward ([2003]), although those criteria do undermine some causalist stances. 1 Introduction2 Modularity3 The Crucially Important Point4 The (...) Gillespie Case: Density-Dependent Selection5 Conclusion. (shrink)

The principle of semantic compositionality, as Jerry Fodor and Ernie Lepore have emphasized, imposes constraints on theories of meaning that it is hard to meet with psychological or epistemic accounts. Here, I argue that this general tendency is exemplified in Michael Dummett's account of meaning. On that account, the so-called manifestability requirement has the effect that the speaker who understands a sentence s must be able to tell whether or not s satisfies central semantic conditions. This requirement is not met (...) by truth-conditional accounts of meaning. On Dummett's view, it is met by a proof conditional account: understanding amounts to knowledge of what counts as a proof of a sentence. A speaker is supposed always to be capable of deciding whether or not a given object is a proof of a given sentence she understands. This requirement comes into conflict with compositionality. If meaning is compositionally determined, then all you need for understanding a sentence is what you get from combining your understanding of the parts according to the mode of composition. But that knowledge is not always sufficient for recognizing any proof at all of a given sentence. Dummett's proof-theoretic argument to the contrary is mistaken. (shrink)

Following Manne (1966, Insider Trading and the Stock Market (New York, Free Press)) we introduce a distinction between insider trading and market manipulation on the one hand and corporate insiders versus misappropriators on the other hand. This gives rise to four types of alleged inside transactions. We argue that the literature on insider trading has often targeted inside transactions type II, III and IV but that these arguments do not necessarily hold for type I transactions. We look for consequentionalist as (...) well as non-consequentionalist arguments against type I transactions and demonstrate that these are hard to find. Throughout the article we refer extensively to the economic literature on insider trading in order to overcome a relative divide between the economic, legal, and philosophical discussion on insider trading. (shrink)

PETER GILMOUR Introduction Although the nine philosophers in this volume can be described as Enlightenment philosophers (or, at least, as philosophers who ...

Fictional truth is commonly analyzed in terms of the speech acts or propositional attitudes of a teller. In this paper, I investigate Lewis’s counterfactual analysis in terms of felicitous narrator assertion, Currie’s analysis in terms of fictional author belief, and Byrne’s analysis in terms of ideal author invitations to make-believe—and find them all lacking. I propose instead an analysis in terms of the revelations of an infelicitous narrator.

Our view is that fundamental appetitive and defensive motivation systems evolved to mediate a complex array of adaptive behaviors that support the organism’s drive to survive—defending against threat and securing resources. Activation of these motive systems engages processes that facilitate attention allocation, information intake, sympathetic arousal, and, depending on context, will prompt tactical actions that can be directed either toward or away from the strategic goal, whether defensively or appetitively determined. Research from our laboratory that measures autonomic, central, and somatic (...) reactions when processing emotional scenes is described which indicates that motivationally relevant cues, whether appetitive or defensive, capture attention preferentially, prompt enhanced perceptual processing and information gathering, and occasion metabolic arousal that mobilizes the organism for coping actions. (shrink)

The so called Ramsey test is a semantic recipe for determining whether a conditional proposition is acceptable in a given state of belief. Informally, it can be formulated as follows: (RT) Accept a proposition of the form "if A, then C" in a state of belief K, if and only if the minimal change of K needed to accept A also requires accepting C. In Gärdenfors (1986) it was shown that the Ramsey test is, in the context of some other (...) weak conditions, on pain of triviality incompatible with the following principle, which was there called the preservation criterion: (P) If a proposition B is accepted in a given state of belief K and the proposition A is consistent with the beliefs in K, then B is still accepted in the minimal change of K needed to accept A. (RT) provides a necessary and sufficient criterion for when a 'positive' conditional should be included in a belief state, but it does not say anything about when the negation of a conditional sentence should be accepted. A very natural candidate for this purpose is the following negative Ramsey test: (NRT) Accept the negation of a proposition of the form "if A, then C" in a consistent state of belief K, if and only if the minimal change of K needed to accept A does not require accepting C. This note shows that (NRT) leads to triviality results even in the absence of additional conditions like (P). (shrink)

Participants of low and high hypnotic susceptibility were tested on a temporal order judgement task, both with and without hypnosis. Judgements were made of the order of presentation of light flashes appearing in first one hemi-field then the other. There were differences in the inter-stimulus intervals required accurately to report the order, depending upon which hemi-field led. This asymmetry was most marked in hypnotically susceptible participants and reversed when they were hypnotised. This implies not only that brain activity changes in (...) hypnosis, but also that there is a difference in brain function between people of low and high hypnotic susceptibility. The latter exhibited a faster-acting left hemisphere in the waking state, but faster right when hypnotised. (shrink)

This book looks at how scientists investigate the nature of the mind and the brain, providing answers to these important questions.

This two-part article includes the following: (1) excerpts from Peter H. Plesch’s essay originally published in Journal of Polymer Science, Part A (2004) 42, 7: 1537-1546 which reflects on Plesch’s research with Polanyi; (2) Plesch’s short account titled “Michael Polanyi and the Paranormal” which complements his original article’s discussion of his work with Polanyi. Together these two pieces provide interesting insights into P'olanyi’s work as a research scientist as weIl as reflections on the nature of scientific discovery.