In his Complaint of Peace, the great sixteenth-century humanist Erasmus allows "Peace" to talk. Peace speaks as a plaintiff, protesting her shabby treatment at the hands of humankind and our ever-ready inclination to launch wars. Against this lure of warfare, Erasmus pits the higher task of peace-building, which can only succeed through the cultivation of justice and respect for all human life. First articulated in 1517, the complaint of peace has echoed through subsequent centuries and down to our age--an age (...) convulsed by world wars, holocausts, and ethnic cleansings. Distinguished political scientist Fred Dallmayr traces this complaint from the writings of Erasmus through the evolution of the "law of nations" to recent and contemporary co-plaintiffs in the West. He also highlights the role of non-Western thinkers and teachings in giving voice to "Peace." In addition to Erasmus, Dallmayr engages major thinkers such as Francisco de Vitoria, Hugo Grotius, Immanuel Kant, Hannah Arendt, Martin Heidegger, Mahatma Ghandi, the Dalai Lama, John Rawls, and Martha Nussbaum. This timely book urgently pleads for greater attentiveness to peace's complaint as an antidote to the prevailing culture of violence and the escalating danger of nuclear catastrophe. Dallmayr offers not only a compelling historical narrative, but powerful ethical and religious arguments vindicating the primacy of peace over violence and war. (shrink)

In his introductory paper to first-order logic, Jon Barwise writes in the Handbook of Mathematical Logic :[T]he informal notion of provable used in mathematics is made precise by the formal notion provable in first-order logic. Following a sug[g]estion of Martin Davis, we refer to this view as Hilbert’s Thesis.This paper reviews the discussion of Hilbert’s Thesis in the literature. In addition to the question whether it is justifiable to use Hilbert’s name here, the arguments for this thesis are compared with (...) those for Church’s Thesis concerning computability. This leads to the question whether one could provide an analogue for proofs of the concept of partial recursive function. (shrink)

Globalization is often seen as a process of universal standardization under the auspices of market economics, technology, and hegemonic power. Resisting this process without endorsing parochial self-enclosure, Fred Dallmayr explores alternative visions that are rooted in distinct vernacular traditions and facilitate cross-cultural learning in an open-ended global arena.

This book provides an in-depth view of the current issues, problems and approaches in the computation of meaning as expressed in language. Aimed at linguists, computer scientists, and logicians with an interest in the computation of meaning, this book focuses on two main topics in recent research in computational semantics. The first topic is the definition and use of underspecified semantic representations, i.e. formal structures that represent part of the meaning of a linguistic object while leaving other parts unspecified. The (...) second topic discussed is semantic annotation. Annotated corpora have become an indispensable resource both for linguists and for developers of language and speech technology, especially when used in combination with machine learning methods. The annotation in corpora has only marginally addressed semantic information, however, since semantic annotation methodologies are still in their infancy. This book discusses the development and application of such methodologies. (shrink)

Diagonalization is a transversal theme in Logic. In this work, it is shown that there exists a common origin of several diagonalization phenomena — paradoxes and Löb's Theorem. That common origin comprises a common reasoning and a common logical structure. We analyse the common structure from a philosophical point-of-view and we draw some conclusions.

The effects of utterances such as cue phrases, keep-turn markers, and grounding signals cannot be characterized as changes to a shared record of the propositions under discussed: the simplest (and arguably most natural) way of characterizing the meaning of these utterances is in terms of a theory in which the conversational score is seen as a record of the discourse situation, or at least of the speech acts that have been performed. The problem then becomes to explain how discourse entities (...) are accessible. We consider three hypotheses about the dynamics of a speech act-based theory of the conversational score, and argue that they could be implemented with relatively minor modifications to the technical tools already introduced in theories such as Compositional DRT. (shrink)

'Nun aber kam die Kritik der Urteilskraft mir zuhanden, und dieser bin ich eine höchst frohe Lebensepoche schuldig.' (Goethe, 1817) In der Epoche der klassischen deutschen Philosophie galt Kants 'Kritik der Urteilskraft' beim gelehrten Publikum als 'beliebteste' Kantschrift. Heute wird sie weitestgehend fragmentarisch und mit einem deutlichen Schwerpunkt auf der Kritik der ästhetischen Urteilskraft gelesen. Obwohl sich der vorliegende Sammelband der gesamten dritten Kritik widmet, versuchen die Autoren insbesondere einen verstärkten Diskurs über Kants Kritik der teleologisch reflektierenden Urteilskraft in Gang (...) zu setzen. Denn für Kant vermag nur eine wohlverstandene kritisch reflektierte Teleologie die Einheit der endlichen Vernunft denkbar zu machen und damit die Transzendentalphilosophie zu vollenden. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:John Henry Newman and the Development of Doctrine: Encountering Change, Looking for Continuity by Stephen MorganReinhard HütterJohn Henry Newman and the Development of Doctrine: Encountering Change, Looking for Continuity by Stephen Morgan. Foreword by Ian Ker (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2021), xvi + 315 pp.St. John Henry Newman was controversial during much of his lifetime—as an Anglican as well as a Catholic. Nothing has changed (...) since. There has been an eagerness to silence his voice, and with it the challenge of his theological insights then, and there is such an eagerness to do so also now—in ways more or less subtle. There are historians whose chosen object of study happens to be the Victorian Newman in the Victorian age and who take the immanent frame they tacitly presuppose as normative horizon and their assumed attitude of scientific detachment as indispensable precondition for historical objectivity, and who dismiss all interpretations of Newman that happen to display signs of substantive agreement with his insights and tenets as "Newman hagiographies" lacking the allegedly requisite scientific distance from their object of investigation. This principle of critical detachment would, of course, entail that Platonists are disqualified from investigating reliably Plato's thought, and the same would obtain presumably for Aristotelians regarding Aristotle, for Thomists regarding Thomas Aquinas, for Marxists regarding Karl Marx, for Foucaultians regarding Foucault, and so on and so forth—and last but not least, for historians committed to the immanent frame and historicist tenets regarding their interpretations of Troeltsch and Mannheim. Such an assumption, when consistently applied, carries itself, of course, sooner or later ad absurdum, but the derogatory denomination "Newman hagiography" survives and is conveniently attachable to whatever interpretation one likes to disqualify as scholarly serious and academically reputable work on Newman. Next to the "unmaskers" of "Newman hagiographies" there are those Newman scholars of a primarily evangelical and Anglican provenance eager to demonstrate that Newman's self-characterization, primarily [End Page 1335] in his Apologia Pro Vita Sua, is at best an ex post facto retro-projection, and hence an inherently unreliable, if not an intentional, re-composition of his intellectual past meant to be deceptive and hence bordering on the mendacious—in short, a renewal of Kingsley's charge. Things are not necessarily better on the Catholic side—since Orestes Brownson's attack, there continue notions, popular among Catholic traditionalists as well as Lefebvrists, that Newman's theory of the development of doctrine, if not outright modernist, is at best crypto-modernist, a view sadly encouraged by Catholic neo-modernists who instrumentalize Newman's account as a justification for interpreting "change" as an interminable but allegedly unavoidable sequence of ruptures and "development" as the intentional activity of progressive developers of doctrine establishing an ongoing praxis of pre-projected desired transmutations of faith, doctrine, and practice.It takes so-called "Newman hagiographers" to set the record straight and to save Newman's ongoingly pertinent and indeed salutary insights from multiple distortions and instrumentalizations, let alone attempts of effectively silencing Newman by way of a more or less subtle character assassination. It requires painstaking archival work and a close, careful, and comprehensive reading of Newman's published letters, diary entries, and works (in their original unrevised versions) as well as letters and works of his interlocutors and collaborators in the Oxford Movement to set the record straight, to unearth Newman's authentic voice, and first and foremost, to acquit him of the charge of systematic disingenuity, if not duplicity, in putting together his own account of the development of his religious opinions.John Henry Newman and the Development of Doctrine comprises, next to an introduction and a conclusion, four substantive chapters of about equal length: the first covering the years up to 1833, with a focus on Newman's first monograph, The Arians of the Fourth Century; the second considering the period from 1833 to 1838, with a focus on the Oxford Movement, the Tracts for the Times, and the Via Media; the third covering the period from 1839 to 1842, with a focus on Tract 90 and its aftermath; the fourth and final chapter advancing close... (shrink)

Mario Bunge forcefully argues for Dual Axiomatics, i.e., an axiomatic method applied to natural sciences which explicitly takes into account semantic aspects of the concepts involved in an axiomatization. In this paper we will discuss how dual axiomatics is equally important in mathematics; both historically in Hilbert and Bernays’s conception as well as today in a set-theoretical environment.

During his time at the Institute for Advanced Study, Kurt Gödel became a close friend of Albert Einstein, and in particular studied the theory of relativity. One result of this study was the discovery of the so-called Gödel universe (strictly speaking, it is about a whole class of universes; the singular form stands here as a collective noun.), a model of Einstein’s field equations of general relativity in which no absolute time can be defined. Theoretically, time travel would be possible (...) in such a universe. (shrink)

"Each nation can do well, as in the life of individuals, only if things go equally well in all of her neighboring nations; the life of sciences is similar to that of states whose interest demands that everything be in order within individual states as properly as their relations be in good order among themselves. Understanding this correctly, the most important carriers of mathematical thoughts have always shown great interest in the law and order in neighboring sciences and, above all (...) for the benefit of mathematics, have cultivated the relations to the neighboring sciences, in particular to physics and epistemology. The essence of these relations and the ground of their fertility will be made most distinct, I believe, if I sketch to you that general method of inquiry which appears to grow more and more significant in modern mathematics; the axiomatic method, I mean." (David Hilbert, 1917). (shrink)

Includes text of Wissenschaftslehre 1814.

In dem Aufsatz werden zwei wichtige Paradigmen für "kontinuierliche" empirische Reihen behandelt: erstens Reihen, deren Glieder stufenlos ineinander übergehende, wahrnehmbare Qualitäten sind, und zweitens Reihen von aufeinanderfolgenden Zeitpunkten. Dabei geht es vor allem um die Frage, welche logischen Voraussetzungen erforderlich sind, um derartige Reihen formal zu explizieren.Im ersten Teil wird Körners Auffassung untersucht, wonach die klassische, zweiwertige Logik keine adäquate Explikationsbasis für Qualitätsreihen darstellt. Körner bezieht sich dabei besonders auf den Begriff der empirischen Vagheit und den der empirischen Kontinuität. Es (...) wird gezeigt, daß Körners Position infolge zahlreicher logischer Schwierigkeiten zur Lösung der vorliegenden Probleme nicht ausreicht.Im zweiten Teil geht es hauptsächlich um Russells Zeittheorie. Insbesondere wird das Problem der Reduzierbarkeit von Zeitpunkten auf Zeitspannen und das Problem der Existenz von Zeitpunkten behandelt. Weiterhin werden einige Voraussetzungen angegeben, mit deren Hilfe die Dichte der Zeitreihe beweisbar is. (shrink)