The transactional interpretation of quantum mechanics, following the time-symmetric formulation of electrodynamics, uses retarded and advanced solutions of the Schrödinger equation and its complex conjugate to understand quantum phenomena by means of transactions. A transaction occurs between an emitter and a specific absorber when the emitter has received advanced waves from all possible absorbers. Advanced causation always raises the specter of paradoxes, and it must be addressed carefully. In particular, different devices involving contingent absorbers or various types of interaction-free measurements (...) have been proposed as threatening the original version of the transactional interpretation. These proposals will be analyzed by examining in each case the configuration of absorbers and, in the special case of the so-called quantum liar experiment, by carefully following the development of retarded and advanced waves through the Mach-Zehnder interferometer. We will show that there is no need to resort to the hierarchy of transactions that some have proposed, and will argue that the transactional interpretation is consistent with the block-universe picture of time. (shrink)

This article examines the research of Louis J. Mordell on the Diophantine equation y2-k=x3\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$$y^2-k=x^3$$\end{document} as it appeared in one of his first papers, published in 1914. After presenting a number of elements relating to Mordell’s mathematical youth and his (problematic) writing, we analyze the 1914 paper by following the three approaches he developed therein, respectively, based on the quadratic reciprocity law, on ideal numbers, and on binary cubic forms. This analysis (...) allows us to describe many of the difficulties in reading and understanding Mordell’s proofs, difficulties which we make explicit and comment on in depth. (shrink)

Pierre Macherey est philosophe, professeur honoraire à l’université de Lille. Rattaché à l’UMR « Savoirs Textes Langage » du CNRS, il continue d’animer un blog « La philosophie au sens large » dont les travaux sont publiés sur le net ( https://philolarge.hypotheses.org/ ). Il a écrit de nombreux ouvrages, aussi bien en philosophie (sur Spinoza, Hegel, Marx, Comte, Canguilhem, Foucault) qu’en littérature et sur la manière de philosopher avec la littérature ( Philosopher avec la littérature est la reprise de sa (...) thèse soutenue en 1991 ; mais il y a aussi, par exemple : Proust. Entre littérature et philosophie ; En lisant Jules Verne ). Son dernier ouvrage s’intitule À l’essai (Paris, Kimé, 2019). Sur l’utopie, il a notamment écrit : De l’utopie! (Le Havre, De l’incidence éditeur, 2011) ainsi que « Utopie et quotidien : les deux faces d’une même réalité? », article publié dans Peggy Avez, Louis Carré et Sébastien Laoureux (dir.), Utopie et quotidien. Autour de Pierre Macherey (Bruxelles, Presses de l’Université Saint Louis, 2016). (shrink)

Sébastien Le Clerc (1637–1714) was the most renowned engraver of Louis XIV's France. For the history of scientific publishing, however, Le Clerc represents a telling paradox. Even though he followed a traditional route based on classic artisanal training, he also published extensively on scientific topics such as cosmology and mathematics. While contemporary scholarship usually stresses the importance of artisanal writing as a direct expression of artisanal experience and know-how, Le Clerc's publications, and specifically the work on cosmology in (...) hisSystème du monde(1706–1708), go far beyond this. By reconstructing the debate between Le Clerc and the professor Mallemant de Messange on the authorship of this ‘system of the world’, this article argues that Le Clerc's involvement in publishing ventures shaped his identity both as an artisan and as a scientific author. Whereas the Scientific Revolution supposedly heralded a change from the world of ‘more or less’ to the ‘world of precision’, this article shows how an artisan could be more ‘precise’ than the learned scholar whose claims he disputed, and points to the importance of the literary field as a useful lens for observing the careers of early modern scientific practitioners. (shrink)

A milestone in the development of post-war Marxist thought.

Reply to John Lewis: Note on "The critique of the personality cult". Remark on the category "Process without a subject or goal(s)"--Elements of self-criticism: On the evolution of the young Marx.--Is it simple to be a Marxist in philosophy? "Something new".

In How to Be a Marxist in Philosophy one of the most famous Marxist philosophers of the 20th century shares his concept of what it means to function fruitfully as a political thinker within the discipline and environs of philosophy. This is the first English translation to Althusser's provocative and, often, controversial guide to being a true Marxist philosopher. Althusser argues that philosophy needs Marxism. It can't exist fully without it. Similarly, Marxism requires the rigour and structures of philosophy to (...) give it form and focus. He calls all thinking people to, 'Remember: a philosopher is a man who fights in theory, and when he understands the reasons for this fight, he joined the ranks of the struggle of workers and popular classes.' In short, this book comprises Althusser's elucidation of what praxis means and why it continues to matter. With a superb introduction from translator and Althusser archivist G.M. Goshgarian, this is a book that will re-inspire contemporary Marxist thought and reinvigorate our notions of what political activism can be. (shrink)

The central claim of Kant's political philosophy is that rational agents sharing a territory can justifiably be forced to live under a state; they have, in Kant's words, a duty of right to leave the state of nature. Perhaps something along these lines is entailed by any theory of state legitimacy, but the point raises special difficulties for Kant. He believes that rational agents have a right to freedom; that is, he believes that a rational agent's external freedom - her (...) ability to set and pursue ends for herself without being subject to the choices of others - can justifiably be restricted only for the sake of external freedom itself. To establish that human beings can be forced to join a civil condition, it will therefore not do to show that the state promotes security, prosperity or any other such value: Kant has to show that human beings living side by side need a state to be free. (shrink)

It is difficult to wander far in contemporary metaphysics without bumping into talk of possible worlds. And reference to possible worlds is not confined to metaphysics. It can be found in contemporary epistemology and ethics, and has even made its way into linguistics and decision theory. What are those possible worlds, the entities to which theorists in these disciplines all appeal? This paper sets out and evaluates a leading contemporary theory of possible worlds, David Lewis's Modal Realism. I note two (...) competing ambitions for a theory of possible worlds: that it be reductive and user-friendly. I then outline Modal Realism and consider objections to the effect that it cannot satisfy these ambitions. I conclude that there is some reason to believe that Modal Realism is not reductive and overwhelming reason to believe that it is not user-friendly. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 11.1 (2004) 71-80 [Access article in PDF] Some Reflections on the (Analytic) Philosophical Approach to Delusion Louis A. Sass There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy." —Hamlet, Act I, Scene 5 The peculiar, often problematic phenome na of psychopathology have been attract ing the attention of analytic philosophers in recent years. The topic of delusion (...) has been a particular draw, with a number of analytic philosophers attempting to use their conceptual tools, usually combined with ideas from cognitive neuroscience, to criticize the traditional understanding and to clarify the nature of this central psychiatric topic. It is useful to have this kind of interdisciplinary dialogue. Indeed, there is good reason to hope that concepts honed in the philosophy of mind and other philosophical subfields will help to sort out our understanding of a phenomenon (or set of phenomena) for which contemporary psychiatric definitions and conceptualizations are clearly inadequate and, in some respects, downright misleading (see Parnas and Sass 2001; Spitzer 1990).1Here, however, I would like to call attention to some weaknesses that, it seems to me, are rather common (I do not say universal) in many analytic philosophical approaches to psychopathology. In my opinion, there is a tendency to formulate issues and arguments in overly polarized, even dichotomous terms, and then to rely too uncritically on these essentialistic formulations in exploring the domain of inquiry. Although this polarizing tendency sometimes has the salutary effect of clarifying conceptual domains, it can, when taken too far, actually hamper our understanding of phenomena that are often fraught with ambiguities and complexities that defy many standard conceptualizations.The relationship between philosophy and psychopathology is obviously a two-way street—we are familiar, for example, with disorders that challenge deep philosophical assumptions about self and mind (e.g., blindsight, split-brain phenomena, perhaps also Dissociative Identity Disorder, and the first rank symptoms of schizophrenia). I am suggesting that, in their work on delusions, philosophers may need to put more emphasis on moving from the natural phenomena [End Page 71] of psychopathology and to the domain of philosophical analysis.I believe that a greater sensitivity to the modes of knowing associated with the phenomenological tradition, and to the forms of conceptual self-critique fostered by Ludwig Wittgenstein, are crucial ingredients for any adequate approach to delusion as well as many other topics in psychopathology. In my opinion, the work of many analytic philosophers interested in psychopathology would be enriched if they spent more time trying to discover and imagine what it might be like to experience certain kinds of abnormal psychiatric conditions, and also speculating about what implications such experiential modalities might have for action and verbal expression. I believe they would also be wise to spend more time questioning, and attempting to transcend, the philosophically derived conceptual distinctions and dichotomies that appear to organize their conceptual universes. Phenomenological imagination and Wittgensteinian critique can show how to move outside the conceptual capsule and into the rich and strange realms of actual experience, both normal and abnormal.So far I have offered only slogans. Let me use the articles by Tim Bayne and Elisabeth Pacherie (2004) and Robert Klee (2004) to flesh out the criticisms I have offered. There is much that is intelligent and much that is worthwhile in both their articles. (For example, I was largely convinced by the criticisms of John Campbell and of Donald Davidson that are central to the articles by Bayne and Pacherie and by Klee, respectively.) Here, however, I will focus only on issues that illustrate the above-mentioned tendencies—tendencies that, in my view, tend to infect even the best writings on the (analytic) philosophy of psychiatry. I will also make some remarks about the works of Campbell and Davidson, the two philosophers criticized in the articles by Bayne and Pacherie and by Klee. Because the article by Eugenie Georgaca (2004) is in a different tradition, I will say only a few words about it at the end. Bayne and Pacherie on the Preservation-Of-meaning... (shrink)

Utopian thinking, and utopias as a genre, flourished as forms of the imaginary until recently. The emergence of the genre, with Thomas More, emphasizing spatial arrangement and with Louis-Sébastien Mercier invoking future orientation, I argue, is illuminated by placing them next to the economic enclosures of their time. Their utopias, however, closed off both the individual and time from the capitalist changes around them, allowing for little or no variation or expression of self. Thus, their imagined virtuous societies (...) actually sought to foreclose the future and other spaces. The paradox is that capitalist development, with its admitted inequities and horrors, favored an expansive self and vital societies, which carry with them their own virtues. In spite of the ameliorative tendencies of utopias, their limitations, that is, their closed-mindedness, slowly but surely discredited the genre itself. Its place has been taken today by science fiction, futurist studies and the exercise of the imaginary in terms of social science. (shrink)

A modified version of the mere exposure effect paradigm was utilized in an implicit artificial grammar learning task in an attempt to develop a procedure that would be more sensitive in assesing nonconscious learning processes than the methods currently utilized within the field of implicit learning. Subjects were presented with stimuli generated from a finite-state artificial grammar and then had to either decide if novel items conformed to the rule structure of the grammar or rate the degree to which they (...) liked novel items. Because the latter of the task was more indirect of the two procedures, subjects′ availability to discriminate between well-formed and ill-formed items on this liking task was taken as a more sensitive piece of evidence of implicit learning, compared to performance on the rule conformity task. A subsequent test of subjects′ explicit knowledge of the rules of the grammar showed that subjects do have some conscious knowledge of the artificial grammar, but subjects making liking decisions exhibited significantly less conscious rule knowledge than subjects initially making rule-conformity judgements. The findings are discussed in relation to synergistic relationships among implicit perception, implicit memory, and implicit learning proceses. (shrink)

Recently it was shown that certain fluid-mechanical ‘pilot-wave’ systems can strikingly mimic a range of quantum properties, including single particle diffraction and interference, quantization of angular momentum etc. How far does this analogy go? The ultimate test of quantumness of such systems is a Bell-test. Here the premises of the Bell inequality are re-investigated for particles accompanied by a pilot-wave, or more generally by a resonant ‘background’ field. We find that two of these premises, namely outcome independence and measurement independence, (...) may not be generally valid when such a background is present. Under this assumption the Bell inequality is possibly violated. A class of hydrodynamic Bell experiments is proposed that could test this claim. Such a Bell test on fluid systems could provide a wealth of new insights on the different loopholes for Bell’s theorem. Finally, it is shown that certain properties of background-based theories can be illustrated in Ising spin-lattices. (shrink)

This reference work is a reprint of the 1694 translation of Moreri's classic reference work . The two volumes contain a mixture of histiographical, geographical and poetical information. They chronicle the lives and actions of celebrated people from the time as well as offering invaluable information on various world-wide regions, empires and kingdoms. Containing over 25,000 entries, the English edition is generally considered superior to the French, as an additional section on the English, Scottish and Irish nobility was added.

Despite its relatively small size, Jason Pearl’s Utopian Geographies and the Early English Novel aspires to tell a big and quite compelling story. This story is framed by the transition, followed here with a particular focus on English literature, from utopias, travel-framed descriptions of avowedly better social, political, and cultural arrangements and institutions, to euchronias, visions of improved worlds made possible by the secular course of historical progress. As it turns out—at least that is the story Pearl wishes to tell—between (...) More’s foundation of the genre as a form of spatial play in 1516 and Louis-Sébastien Mercier’s transmutation of its speculative ontology in 1772 (in Memoirs of... (shrink)

A general model of problem‐solving processes based on misconception elimination is presented to simulate both impasses and solving processes. The model operates on goal‐related rules and a set of constraint rules in the form of “if (state or goal), do not (Action)” for the explicit constraints in the instructions and the implicit constraints that come from misconceptions of legal moves. When impasses occur, a constraint elimination mechanism is applied. Because successive eliminations of implicit constraints enlarge the problem space and have (...) an effect on planning, the model integrates “plan‐based” and “constraint‐based” approaches to problem‐solving behavior.Simulating individual protocols of Tower of Hanoi situations shows that the model, which has a proper set of constraints, predicts a single move with no alternative on about 61% of the movements and that protocols are quite successfully simulated movement by movement. Finally, it is shown that many features of previous models are embedded in the constraint elimination model. (shrink)

Depuis Droit, mythe et raison (1980) écrit avec Jacques Lenoble jusqu’aux récents À quoi sert le droit? Usages, fonctions et finalités (2016) ou Le droit, objet de passions (2018), François Ost ne cesse de questionner les rapports de nos sociétés au droit et la place de celui-ci dans nos sociétés contemporaines. Avec Le droit malgré tout, il s’agit de rendre hommage à l’œuvre et à la carrière d’une figure centrale de la théorie du droit contemporaine et aussi au fondateur, avec (...) le regretté Michel van de Kerchove, de ce que l’on appelle parfois « l’école de Saint-Louis ». Abordant les deux pôles de la dialectique à laquelle François Ost est si attaché - la critique et la reconstruction -, l’ouvrage propose un regard interdisciplinaire sur le droit, à travers les principaux thèmes qui ont nourri la pensée de l’auteur. Du statut épistémologique de la science du droit à un questionnement sur les fondements et l’avenir du droit et de la justice, des liens qu’entretiennent le droit et la littérature jusqu’à l’environnement saisi par le droit en passant par les « communs », les approches de ses collègues et amis sont toutes réflexives et critiques. En ce qu’elles sont soucieuses de soumettre le droit au regard des sciences sociales et, inversement, les normativités extra-juridiques au regard du droit, elles sont fidèles à la démarche de François Ost. Ce Liber Amicorum propose aussi un retour réflexif sur son œuvre par l’auteur lui-même, dans un entretien avec Manuel Atienza. Contributeurs : Yves CARTUYVELS, Robert JACOB, Mark VAN HOECKE, Jacques COMMAILLE, Isabelle HACHEZ, Laurent VAN EYNDE, Jacques LENOBLE, Benoit FRYDMAN, Alain PAPAUX, Guillaume DE STEXHE, Diane BERNARD, Antoine GARAPON, Jacques CHEVALLIER, Alain SUPIOT, Paul MARTENS, Jérémie VAN MEERBEECK, Sébastien VAN DROOGHENBROECK, Nicolas BERNARD et Françoise TULKENS, Pierre LEGRAND, Annette RUELLE, Isabelle OST, Jeanne GAAKEER, Massimo VOGLIOTTI, Denis SALAS, Pauline BÉGASSE DE DHAEM et Marie-Sophie DE CLIPPELE, Xavier DELGRANGE, Delphine MISONNE, Benoît JADOT, Alain STROWEL, Hugues DUMONT, Jean-Guy BELLEY, Antoine BAILLEU. (shrink)

This paper explores how realism is crucial in understanding rule-following. The strategy involves starting from what has been achieved by Wittgenstein and others as regards semantic normativity and then applying it to other areas, including moral deliberation. The result shows that realism in rule-following involves not only the weak claim that rules are independent of the individual rule-follower, as conventions are. It involves also the stronger claim that conventional rules are constrained by non-conventional constraints. These constraints depend neither on the (...) individual nor on the group. They arise from the nature of things. Human rule-followers are constrained first by being material beings, secondly by being living organisms, and thirdly by being rational. (shrink)

Impairments in cognitive coordination in schizophrenia are supported by phenomenological data that suggest deficits in the processing of visual context. Although the target article is sympathetic to such a phenomenological perspective, we argue that the relevance of phenomenological data for a wider understanding of consciousness in schizophrenia is not sufficiently addressed by the authors.

The interaction between science and theology is often seen as an interaction concerning their claims. This article examines how this interaction may also concern their questions. The focus will be on environmental issues because the relevance of these issues has increased tremendously during these last decades. Recent studies have focused on the way a question can become real for any community of inquirers, both in science and in theology. Reality here refers to the way a question emerges as one that (...) can, and should, be dealt with. The paper explores how this idea is applicable to questions concerning the environment, how they have become real, and how this fact will impact our moral deliberation about what we ought to do, personally and globally. (shrink)

The method of supervaluations offers an elegant procedure by which semantic theory can come to terms with sentences that, for one reason or another, lack truth-value. I argue, however, that this method rests on a fundamental mistake, and so is unsuitable for semantics. The method of supervaluations, I argue, assigns semantic values to sentences based not on the semantic values of their components, but on the values of other, perhaps homophonic, but nevertheless distinct, expressions. That is because supervaluations are generated (...) from classical valuations which necessarily require reinterpreting the component expressions, but the reinterpretation of an expression is tantamount to the introduction of a new expression, or alternatively, to a shift to an entirely new language. To confuse the expression of the language for which a semantic theory is developed with its reinterpreted counterpart, is to commit a fallacy of equivocation. That is the flaw within the method of supervaluations. We see it manifest in a number of examples. (shrink)