Treatment of human differences in Scripture, particularly regarding the Cushites, raises the question of whether this group was “racially othered” by the Hebrews, or whether differences in phenological presentation and cultural customs were vested with less significance than they have been in a contemporary milieu.

By Jerome Rothenberg. Contributions by Steven Clay, Rodney Phillips.

Reviewed Works:Andrea Sorbi, Complexity, Logic, and Recursion Theory.Klaus Ambos-Spies, Elvira Mayordomo, Resource-Bounded Measure and Randomness.Marat Arslanov, Degree Structures in Local Degree Theory.Jose L. Balcazar, Ricard Gavalda, Montserrat Hermo, Compressibility of Infinite Binary Sequences.S. Barry Cooper, Beyond Godel's Theorem: The Failure to Capture Information Content.Robert A. Di Paola, Franco Montagna, Progressions of Theories of Bounded Arithmetic.Rodney G. Downey, On Presentations of Algebraic Structures.Sophie Fischer, Lane Hemaspaandra, Leen Torenvliet, Witness-Isomorphic Reductions and Local Search.William Gasarch, Carl H. Smith, A Survey of Inductive (...) Inference with an Emphasis on Queries.Andre Nies, A Uniformity of Degree Structures.Piergiorgio Odifreddi, Short Course on Logic, Algebra, and Topology.Andrea Sorbi, The Enumeration Degrees of the $\sigma^0_2$ Sets.Peter van Emde Boas, The Convenience of Tilings. (shrink)

In this book Steven Levine explores the relation between objectivity and experience from a pragmatic point of view. Like many new pragmatists he aims to rehabilitate objectivity in the wake of Richard Rorty's rejection of the concept. But he challenges the idea, put forward by pragmatists like Robert Brandom, that objectivity is best rehabilitated in communicative-theoretic terms - namely, in terms that can be cashed out by capacities that agents gain through linguistic communication. Levine proposes instead that objectivity is (...) best understood in experiential-theoretic terms. He explains how, in order to meet the aims of the new pragmatists, we need to do more than see objectivity as a norm of rationality embedded in our social-linguistic practices; we also need to see it as emergent from our experiential interaction with the world. Innovative and carefully argued, this book redeems and re-actualizes for contemporary philosophy a key insight developed by the classical pragmatists. (shrink)

Although Darwin insisted that human intelligence could be fully explained by the theory of evolution, the codiscoverer of natural selection, Alfred Russel Wallace, claimed that abstract intelligence was of no use to ancestral humans and could only be explained by intelligent design. Wallace’s apparent paradox can be dissolved with two hypotheses about human cognition. One is that intelligence is an adaptation to a knowledge-using, socially interdependent lifestyle, the “cognitive niche.” This embraces the ability to overcome the evolutionary fixed defenses of (...) plants and animals by applications of reasoning, including weapons, traps, coordinated driving of game, and detoxification of plants. Such reasoning exploits intuitive theories about different aspects of the world, such as objects, forces, paths, places, states, substances, and other people’s beliefs and desires. The theory explains many zoologically unusual traits in Homo sapiens, including our complex toolkit, wide range of habitats and diets, extended childhoods and long lives, hypersociality, complex mating, division into cultures, and language (which multiplies the benefit of knowledge because know-how is useful not only for its practical benefits but as a trade good with others, enhancing the evolution.. (shrink)

This paper presents and defends a Rawlsian argument for perfectionist state policies. The argument draws on Rawls’s discussion of the “Aristotelian Principle,” highlighting the complex relationship between this principle and the social bases of self-respect. The paper explains how Rawls’s discussion and endorsement of this principle has significant and unappreciated implications for his account of the human good and the state’s role in promoting it in a well-ordered society. Although Rawls explicitly rejected state perfectionism, the paper shows how his conception (...) of justice has the resources to respond to the important criticism that it is insufficiently responsive to the claims of human excellence. Rawlsian perfectionism, in this way, strengthens Rawlsian justice by removing an important reason for rejecting it. (shrink)

Decision making is the physician's major activity. Every day, in doctors' offices throughout the world, patients describe their symptoms and com plaints while doctors perform examinations, order tests, and, on the basis of these data, decide what is wrong and what should be done. Although the process may appear routine-even to the physicians in volved-each step in the sequence requires skilled clinical judgment. Physicians must decide: which symptoms are important, whether any laboratory tests should be done, how the various items (...) of clinical data should be combined, and, finally, which of several treatments (including doing nothing) is indicated. Although much of the information used in clinical decision making is objective, the physician's values (a belief that pain relief is more important than potential addiction to pain-killing drugs, for example) and subjectivity are as much a part of the clinical process as the objective findings of laboratory tests. In recent years, both physicians and psychologists have come to realize that patient management decisions are not only subjective but also prob abilistic (although this is not always acknowledged overtly). When doc tors argue that an operation is fairly safe because it has a mortality rate of only 1 %, they are at least implicitly admitting that the outcome of their decision is based on probability. (shrink)

Cenzer, D., R. Downey, C. Jockusch and R.A. Shore, Countable thin Π01 classes, Annals of Pure and Applied Logic 59 79–139. A Π01 class P {0, 1}ω is thin if every Π01 subclass of P is the intersection of P with some clopen set. Countable thin Π01 classes are constructed having arbitrary recursive Cantor- Bendixson rank. A thin Π01 class P is constructed with a unique nonisolated point A and furthermore A is of degree 0’. It is shown that no (...) set of degree ≥0” can be a member of any thin Π01 class. An r.e. degree d is constructed such that no set of degree d can be a member of any thin Π01 class. It is also shown that between any two distinct comparable r.e. degrees, there is a degree that contains a set which is of rank one in some thin Π01 class. It is shown that no maximal set can have rank one in any Π01 class, while there exist maximal sets of rank 2. The connection between Π01 classes, propositional theories and recursive Boolean algebras is explored, producing several corollaries to the results on Π01 classes. For example, call a recursive Boolean algebra thin if it has no proper nonprincipal recursive ideals. Then no thin recursive Boolean algebra can have a maximal ideal of degree ≥0”. (shrink)

Why do policies fail? How can we objectively choose the best policy from two (or more) competing alternatives? How can we create better policies? To answer these critical questions this book presents an innovative yet workable approach. Avoiding Policy Failure uses emerging metapolicy methodologies in case studies that compare successful policies with ones that have failed. Those studies investigate the systemic nature of each policy text to gain new insights into why policies fail. -/- In addition to providing intriguing directions (...) for research, this book also suggests a bold new standard for evaluating policies. While this method is broadly generalizable, specific examples are provided showing how to develop better Economic Policy, Military Policy, and Constitutional Organizations. This book shows scholars, researchers, and policy analysts how to develop more effective policies so that we may achieve our highest aspirations and avoid the horrendous failures of the past. (shrink)

Issues that arise in using game theory to model national security problems are discussed, including positing nation-states as players, assuming that their decision makers act rationally and possess complete information, and modeling certain conflicts as two-person games. A generic two-person game called the Conflict Game, which captures strategic features of such variable-sum games as Chicken and Prisoners'' Dilemma, is then analyzed. Unlike these classical games, however, the Conflict Game is a two-stage game in which each player can threaten to retaliate (...) — and carry out this threat in the second stage — if its opponent chose noncooperation in the first stage.Conditions for the existence of different pure-strategy Nash equilibria, or stable outcomes, are found, and these results are extended to situations in which the players can select mixed strategies (i.e., make probabilistic threats or choices). Although the Conflict Game sheds light on the rational foundations underlying arms races, nuclear deterrence, and other strategic situations, more detailed assumptions are required to tie this generic game to specific conflicts. (shrink)

In the only two articles on the topic of which I am aware, Chad Carlson and Scott Aikin have leveled three objections against fantasy sports—namely, that participation in fantasy sports elicits...

Research Articles Steven Wall, Social Philosophy and Policy, FirstView Article.

This volume contains new translations of the essential philosophical writings of Thomas Aquinas, from the _Summa Theologiae_ and _The Principles of Nature_. The included texts represent the breadth of Aquinas’s thought, addressing causality, the fundamental principles of nature, the existence of God, how God can be known, how language can be used to describe God, human nature, happiness, ethics, and natural law. The goal of these translations is twofold: to allow Aquinas to speak for himself, but also to make his (...) thought accessible to the contemporary reader without the burden of unnecessary adherence to convention. A thorough introduction to Aquinas and his ideas is included, as is a series of useful appendices connecting Aquinas’s arguments to those of Anselm, Scotus, Ockham, and others. (shrink)

This article, translated by Jose ARNOZ, examines the role of number in Augustine's philosophy. While the analysis focuses on the sixth book of De musica and the second book of De libero arbitrio, it does include some of Augustine's other works. I argue that number plays many roles for Augustine including forming notions of ordinary arithmetic, describing meter and rhythm, but most importantly, forming every created object. As a result, every created thing has within it a residual number which could (...) serve to draw the intellect toward God whom Augustine identifies as unity or One. (shrink)

An original metaphysical proposal building on classical and contemporary sources. In Centering and Extending, Steven G. Smith retrieves and refashions some of the best ideas of classical and early modern metaphysics to support insight into the natures of mental and material beings and their relations. Avoiding what he critiques as distortive paths of idealism, materialism, repressive monism, and overly permissive pluralism, Smith builds his framework on centering and extending as universal principles of formation. Identifying the basic consistency of being (...) with these principles in symmetrical partnership enables a naturalist process view that, unlike Whitehead’s, does not overbalance toward the subjective and teleological and, unlike Deleuze and Guattari’s, does not overbalance toward the material and chaotic. This view supports useful conceptions of mind and matter, form and energy, reason and cause, and a layered world order without relying on a blind concept of supervenience or emergence. It also respects and reinforces a division of roles between metaphysical sense-making and spiritual determinations of meaningfulness. Steven G. Smith is Jennie Carlisle Golding Professor of Philosophy at Millsaps College. He is the author of several books, including Worth Doing, also published by SUNY Press. (shrink)

DOES SLAVERY EXIST BY NATURE as some throughout history have been taken to believe? Or is slavery merely conventional, sanctioned by the opinions and practices of diverse communities? Is it a punishment for sinfulness or proscribed by the natural law? Can one sell oneself into slavery as the result of a free exchange, or is slavery prohibited by virtue of the natural rights of the individual? Is slavery a necessary moment in the struggle of human beings to attain mutual recognition (...) and respect? Or have modern institutions like the market economy and the state created new and potentially more ominous forms of oppression? (shrink)

Most evidence for the role of regular inflection as a default operation comes from languages that confound the morphological properties of regular and irregular forms with their phonological characteristics. For instance, regular plurals tend to faithfully preserve the base’s phonology, whereas irregular nouns tend to alter it. The distinction between regular and irregular inflection may thus be an epiphenomenon of phonological faithfulness. In Hebrew noun inflection, however, morphological regularity and phonological faithfulness can be distinguished: Nouns whose stems change in the (...) plural may take either a regular or an irregular suffix, and nouns whose stems are preserved in the plural may take either a regular or an irregular suffix. We use this dissociation to examine two hallmarks of default inflection: its lack of dependence on analogies from similar regular nouns, and its application to nonroots such as names. We show that these hallmarks of regularity may be found whether or not the plural form preserves the stem faithfully: People apply the regular suffix to novel nouns that don’t resemble existing nouns, and to names that sound like irregular nouns, regardless of whether the stem is ordinarily preserved in the plural of that family of nouns. Moreover, when they pluralize names, they do not apply the stem changes that are found in their homophonous nouns, replicating an effect found in English and German. These findings show that the distinction between regular and irregular phenomena cannot be reduced to differences in the kinds of phonological changes associated with those phenomena in English. Instead, regularity and irregularity must be distinguished in terms of the kinds of mental computations that effect them: symbolic operations versus memorized idiosyncrasies. A corollary is that complex words are not generally dichotomizable as “regular” or “irregular”; different aspects of a word may be regular or irregular depending on whether they violate the rule for that aspect and hence must be stored in memory.. (shrink)

From at least 1925 to the present, science and technology have been depicted largely negatively in popular films of all genres. The images of science and technology in films reflect consistent public anxiety over the linkage between science, technology, and corporate power; the complacency of government agen cies and scientists toward new knowledge and artifacts; the insensitivity of scientists toward the moral implications of their research and its applications; and the co-option of technical knowledge by vested corporate and government interests. (...) Public conservatism is reflected in the suspicion toward new knowledge and new artifacts and in questioning whether science and technology truly improve the human condition. (shrink)

In this keynote address, I reflect on the origin, history, past accomplishments, and guiding principles of the International Society for Universal Dialogue. I also reflect on the future challenges facing our society and the need to critique, clarify, revise, and renew our core principles, values, and ideals.

This article deals with the aesthetics of the art documentary of the 1940s and 1950s, which can be considered as the Golden Age of the genre. Prior to the breakthrough of television in Europe, which would usurp and standardize the art documentary, cinematic reproductions of artworks resulted in experimental shorts that were highly self-reflexive. These films became visual laboratories to investigate the tensions between movement and stasis, the two- and three-dimensional, and the real and the artificial—a film on art was (...) self-consciously presented as an art film. Focusing on La Leggenda di Sant’Orsola by Luciano Emmer and Le Monde de Paul Delvaux by Henri Storck, this article also investigates how the animation of the static image by the film medium relates to Surrealist practices. (shrink)

"In the closing chapters of Ezekiel, a great Temple is described, one reminiscent of Solomon's but in fact like none ever built. From that Temple, a river flows through the land, with healing in its wake; within the Temple dwells the divine Glory, depicted here alone in Ezekiel as coming to rest, never again to be removed. All of these features of Ezekiel's grand vision are embedded in the core of Jewish and Christian devotional and mystical practice. Yet no less (...) intriguing for the exegete is the legislation promulgated in this elaborate vision report. Here is found the only body of law in the Hebrew Scriptures not placed in the mouth of Moses. Laws regarding sacrifices and festivals, the conduct of the prince, the nature of the priesthood, and the division of the land all center upon the Temple, which is the one common reference for this rich, multifaceted material." From Chapter 1: The Unity and Theme of the Temple Vision. (shrink)

Moving beyond the work of Rawls and his critics, this concise collection contains critical essays in contemporary political philosophy. All have been chosen for their importance and accessibility, and some have been edited by their authors for inclusion in this work. Political Philosophy in the Twenty-First Century covers five main topics: equality, justice, liberty, democracy, and human rights. To assist readers, the editors have also provided section introduction and study questions as well as an overall introduction explaining the background to (...) contemporary work in political philosophy. Beginning where most other anthologies in political philosophy conclude, this book can be used alone or in conjunction with any collection of historical sources. (shrink)