This chapter discusses the role of general models for language change and considers four such classes of model. The farming/language dispersal model is a frequent case for language replacement. But problems of chronology frequently obscure the relationships between archaeological and linguistic data.

Despite the many well-documented similarities -- genetic, cognitive, behavioral, social -- between our human selves and our evolutionary forebears, a significant gulf remains between us and them. Why is that? How did it come about? And how did we come to be the way we are? In this book fourteen distinguished scholars -- including humanist, atheist, and theist voices -- address such questions as they explore how and when human personhood emerged. Representing various disciplines, the contributors all offer significant insights (...) into new scientific research about the origins of human nature -- research that challenges some traditional views. CONTRIBUTORS Francisco J. Ayala Justin L. Barrett Roy F. Baumeister Warren S. Brown Richard W. Byrne Matthew J. Jarvinen Malcolm Jeeves Timothy O'Connor Lynn K. Paul Colin Renfrew Ian Tattersall Anthony C. Thiselton Alan J. Torrance Adam Zeman. (shrink)

The guiding thread of this book is the distinction Colin McGinn draws between perception and imagination.

Stephen Nickell: Practical Issues in UK Monetary Policy, 2000-2005 Alan C Dessen: Staging Matters: Shakespeare, the Director, and the Theatre Historian Lord Bingham of Cornhill: The Judges: Active or Passive? Marilyn Strathern: Useful Knowledge Jane Stabler: Byron, Conversation and Discord Keith Wrightson: Mutualities and Obligations: Changing Social Relationships in Early Modern England Carlo Ginzburg: Dante's Epistle to Cangrande and its Two Authors Colin Renfrew: Becoming Human: the Archaeological Challenge Lothar von Falkenhausen: The Inscribed Bronzes from Yangjiacun: New Evidence (...) on Social Structure and Historical Consciousness in Late Western Zhou China Joseph Koerner: Everyman in Motion: from Bosch to Bruegels and Notes on Lectures. (shrink)

Elementary axioms describe a category of categories. Theorems of category theory follow, including some on adjunctions and triples. A new result is that associativity of composition in categories follows from cartesian closedness of the category of categories. The axioms plus an axiom of infinity are consistent iff the axioms for a well-pointed topos with separation axiom and natural numbers are. The theory is not finitely axiomatizable. Each axiom is independent of the others. Further independence and definability results are proved. Relations (...) between categories and sets, the latter defined as discrete categories, are described, and applications to foundations are discussed. (shrink)

An introduction to the ideas of the British philosopher, Peter Winch (1926-97). In charting the development of Winch's ideas, it engages with many of the major preoccupations of philosophy.

In recent years there has been a bold revival in the field of natural theology, where “natural theology” can be understood as the attempt to demonstrate that God exists by way of reason, evidence, and argument without the appeal to divine revelation. Today's practitioners of natural theology have not only revived and recast all of the traditional arguments in the field, but, by drawing upon the findings of contemporary cosmology, chemistry, and biology, have also developed a range of fascinating new (...) ones. -/- Contemporary Arguments in Natural Theology brings together twenty experts working in the field today. Together, they practice natural theology from a wide range of perspectives, and show how the field of natural theology is practiced today with a degree of diversity and confidence not seen since the Middle Ages. Aimed primarily at advanced undergraduates and graduate students, the volume will also be of interest to researchers in philosophy, theology, biblical studies, and religious studies, as an indispensable resource on contemporary theistic proofs. (shrink)

In this article, I respond to Augustin Fragnière's recent attempt to understand the demandingness of individual climate duties by appealing to the difference between “concentrated” harm and “spread” harm and the importance of “moral thresholds”. I suggest his arguments don't succeed in securing the conclusion he is after, even from within his own commitments, which themselves are problematic. As this is primarily a critical project, the upshot of this discussion is that if there is a defensible way to justify the (...) intuition that the duty to reduce emissions can't be overly demanding, it has to be found elsewhere. (shrink)

This lucidly written book looks at the interpretative audacity of five major "overreaders"—Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, Emmanuel Levinas, Slavoj Žižek and Stanley Cavell—and asks what is at stake and what is to be gained by their ...

Nanotechnology thrives in the realm of the virtual. Throughout its history, the field has been shaped by futuristic visions of technological revolution, hyperbolic promises of scientific convergence at the molecular scale, and science fiction stories of the world rebuilt atom by atom. Even today, amid the welter of innovative nanomaterials that increasingly appear in everyday consumer products—the nanoparticles enhancing our sunscreens, the carbon nanotubes strengthening our tennis rackets, the antimicrobial nano-silver lining our socks, the nanofilms protecting our wrinkle-free trousers—the public (...) rhetoric of nanotechnology constantly reminds us that such precision-engineered materials merely represent a trace or a premonition of the amazing future still to come... (shrink)

The large-structure tools of cohomology including toposes and derived categories stay close to arithmetic in practice, yet published foundations for them go beyond ZFC in logical strength. We reduce the gap by founding all the theorems of Grothendieck’s SGA, plus derived categories, at the level of Finite-Order Arithmetic, far below ZFC. This is the weakest possible foundation for the large-structure tools because one elementary topos of sets with infinity is already this strong.

Kaur (2012) raises the question, how can education be more inclusive and representative when catering to diverse groups and students? Does our entitlement to human kindness cease once incarcerated, and are we to be forever banished to the outskirts of society? The majority of offender education research assesses success or failure through mechanistic, objective and calculated criteria. Statistically, offenders repeatedly underachieve in primary and secondary education; offenders who partake in some form of adult and post-release learning continue this pattern, and (...) face other non-learning barriers that impact on participation and accreditation outcomes (Prison Education Trust, 2018). Departing from conventional modes and methods of teaching, this article examines the transformative journeys of former offenders, and considers the role of education in supporting them to lead more productive and meaningful lives. (shrink)

Like all previously published volumes of his lectures, the content of The Government of the Living defies brief summary. It shows us Foucault in 1980 mapping out a major new phase in his work in terms that complicate our existing understanding of his unfinished project. My review looks in turn at the two parts of the course: an unusually lengthy discussion of method and heuristics, followed by a tightly focused study of early Christian regimes of truth. I suggest that the (...) complex opening theoretical reflections in these lectures go well beyond mapping the course of the immediately following historical analysis. They need to be seen in coordination with other conceptual innovations introduced over the following years, putting a task that Foucault calls here a “history of the power of truth” on his agenda alongside, and in integral connection with the previously defined tasks of a history of governmentality and a history of the subject. A newly published discussion in Berkeley later in 1980 adds crucial context to these Paris lectures, spelling out the linkage of structures of subjectivation to governability and of penitential ascetics to pastoral power. Taken together, the later books and lectures can now be seen to establish a framework of what I suggest we can call “alethic” or “aletheological” analysis, analysing and mapping across the span of Western history the modes of engagement of life and truth, with a view to enabling a renewed analysis of the political present. (shrink)

According to Stephen Law’s “X-claim argument,” the theist’s acquiring (what I call) an “x-claim defeater” automatically provides the theist with a reason to give up her x-claim belief. Contrary to Law, I argue that, even if the theist acquires such a defeater, it does not follow that the theist ought to give up her x-claim belief. This is because the degree of justification possessed by the theist’s belief may be sufficient to epistemically insulate itself against the x-claim defeater that was (...) initially brought against it. Hence, the theist may be justified in maintaining her x-claim belief. (shrink)

This study presents an analysis and comparison of two influential modern approaches to the doctrine of God that, although in many aspects diametrically oppose each other, have numerous points of contact.

Keith DeRose believes that it is a strength of his contextualist analysis that it explains why the recently much-discussed skeptical Argument from Ignorance (AI) is so persuasive. Not only that, however; DeRose also believes that he is able to explain the underlying dynamics of AI by utilizing solely the epistemological and linguistic resources contained within his contextualist analysis. DeRose believes, in other words, that his contextualist analysis functions as a genuinely self-contained explanation of skepticism. But does it? In this paper (...) I argue that DeRose’s analysis does not function as a self-contained explanation of skepticism since, as it turns out, DeRose’s analysis is simply irrelevant to the main concerns of the skeptic. To the extent that DeRose’s analysis is irrelevant in this way, I conclude that such an analysis cannot be considered a satisfactory treatment of AI. (shrink)

The political context of the conversion of the Historic Tramway Bridge, adjacent to Sandon Point in Bulli (NSW, Australia), and how this was exploited to serve predetermined ends, illustrates that technologies can be designed to have particular social (and political) effects. Through reflection on this relatively small engineering project, this paper provides a concrete example of what Langdon Winner (1986) attempted to expose in his (in)famous and contested analysis of “the low bridges of Robert Moses”. The means through which this (...) project reflected specific political and economic interests, and how such interests were largely unmarked and unquestioned, locate issues of concerns for the broader public and the engineering profession as a whole. In reflecting on the Tramway Bridge conversion, consideration is given to how far the project of creating the new engineer has progressed in seeking to address the great social, economic, environmental and cultural challenges of our time (Johnson, 1996). (shrink)