We have considered a simple word game called the word-morph. After making our participants play a stipulated number of word-morph games, we have analyzed the experimental data. We have given a detailed analysis of the learning involved in solving this word game. We propose that people are inclined to learn landmarks when they are asked to navigate from a source to a destination. We note that these landmarks are nodes that have high closeness-centrality ranking.

Prof. Iyengar's biography of Sri Aurobindo, long a standard reference work, is now in its fifth edition. The author's subtitle indicates the depth and breadth of the book, as it links the life of Sri Aurobindo, who played for our age the crucial role of leader of humanity's evolving destiny , with the history of India and the world. It also provides detailed discussions of Sri Aurobindo's writings, from the early poems and plays to the politics of Bande Mataram, (...) from the philosophy and social thought of the Arya to the epic masterpiece of Savitri, as the essential keys to understanding his life and work. This book is available again after a long time. (shrink)

Having known classical wave optics and wave mechanics, can we reverse Schrödinger's path and extend the concept of families of rays of light to provide a new exact rendering of quantum optics including the Bose nature of photons? This question is answered in the affirmative, and the implications of the Bose symmetry for certain nonlocal correlations of the many-ray distribution functions are worked out. The similarities and the differences between classical and quantum wave optics are brought out. The ray-ray Bose (...) correlation is analyzed. The generating functional for the many-ray distribution functions is formulated; and the notion of paraxial illumination for quantum optics is made precise. (shrink)

First published in 2000. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

In 1931 the mathematical logician Kurt Godel published a revolutionary paper that challenged certain basic assumptions underpinning mathematics and logic. A colleague of Albert Einstein, his theorem proved that mathematics was partly based on propositions not provable within the mathematical system and had radical implications that have echoed throughout many fields. A gripping combination of science and accessibility, Godel’s Proof by Nagel and Newman is for both mathematicians and the idly curious, offering those with a taste for logic and philosophy (...) the chance to satisfy their intellectual curiosity. (shrink)

In an international survey of rationing we have found that European physicians encounter scarcity-related ethical difficulties, and are dissatified with the resolution of many of these cases. Here we further examine survey results to explore whether ethics support services would be potentially useful in addressing scarcity related ethical dilemmas. Results indicate that while the type of help offered by ethics support services was considered helpful by physicians, they rarely referred difficulties regarding scarcity to ethics consultation. We propose that ethics consultants (...) could assist physicians by making the process less difficult, and by contributing to decisions being more ethically justifiable. Expertise in bringing considerations of justice to bear on real cases could also be useful in recognising an unjust limit, as opposed to a merely frustrating limit. Though these situations are unlikely to be among the most frequently referred to ethics support services, ethics consultants should be prepared to address them. (shrink)

Following promulgation of the Nuremberg code in 1947, the ethics of research on human subjects has been a challenging and often contentious topic of debate. Escalation in the use of research participants in low-income countries over recent decades , has intensified the debate on the ethics of international research and led to increasing attention both to exploitation of vulnerable subjects and to considerations of how the 10:90 gap in health and medical research could be narrowed. In 2000, prompted by the (...) discussions over several years that led to the US NIH launching a capacity building programme on research ethics for members of research ethics committees in developing countries, we advanced a ‘new look’ for the ethics of international research.1 Since then progress has been made on several fronts.First, our ideas—considered somewhat radical and impractical at the time—have been provocatively addressed by scholars who have either contested them or advanced similar conceptions of what obligations international researchers have to research participants and communities in low income countries before, during and after clinical trials. Second, those researchers who have been sympathetic to our ideas have either endeavoured to put these into practice or have investigated the feasibility of doing so. Third, the intractability of the 10/90 gap and the escalation of interest in global health have sensitised many to the need to amplify the uptake of these ideas in practice.Here, we briefly review the conceptual and practical developments in international research ethics. While much conceptual progress has been made (and the concepts are now appearing …. (shrink)

Tara Smith's book on Rand's ethics is reviewed by Stephen Hicks for *Philosophy in Review.*.

This paper seeks to explore the implementation of corporate ethical culture and policies as an adjunct to formal forms of corporate governance. The insurance industry utilises a variety of external governance structures, but is almost unique in that stock companies (which are exposed to an external market for corporate control) and mutual companies (which are owned by a subset of their customers) are in active competition. A questionnaire survey of senior executives in U.K. insurance companies was undertaken to explore the (...) implementation of ethical policies and codes, to investigate ethical attitudes, and to analyze the extent to which these policies and attitudes varied among companies. The results suggest that ethical policies have a higher profile and ethical attitudes and behaviour are more positive in mutual as opposed to stock insurance companies. These findings support the contention that a strong corporate ethical culture may be utilised to enhance formal corporate governance instruments. (shrink)

This set reprints volumes that were orginally published by Routledge and Kegan Paul Ltd. in 1953. Landmark volumes at the time of their original publication, these titles do not merely expound the theoretical constructions of Russian philosophers, but also relate these constructions to the general conditions of Russian life. Volume One examines the historical conditions of the development of philosophy in Russia and explores the general features of Russian philosophy. It also surveys the principal works on the history of Russian (...) philosophy. Volume Two includes biographies and examination of the themes of the following philosophers; Vladimir Solovyov, V.D. Kudryavtsev, N.F. Fyodorov and Later Hegelians such as Chicherin, Debolski and Bakunin. This volume also provides analysis of various schools of thought in Russian philosophy in the twentieth century, for example; Neo-Leibzianism, Modern Positivism and New-Marxism to name but a few. (shrink)

Indian philosophy has ancient origin, but contemporary in significance. It is wide and varied, but holistic and integral in its approach. In terms of contemporary needs and aspirations, it has to be revisited and reinterpreted. It is imperative on the part of contemporary thinkers and scholars to properly understand from the original sources and put forth its true spirit without any bias and prejudices. Then only its real message can be disseminated to the world, and an attempt is made here (...) to provide a blueprint to undertake this exercise. (shrink)

It is shown in the present paper that the transformation relating a parallel transported vector in a Weyl space to the original one is the product of a multiplicative gauge transformation and a proper orthochronous Lorentz transformation. Such a Lorentz transformation admits a spinor representation, which is obtained and used to deduce the transportation properties of a Weyl spinor, which are then expressed in terms of a composite gauge group defined as the product of a multiplicative gauge group and the (...) spinor group. These properties render a spinor amenable to its treatment as a particle coupled to a multidimensional gauge field in the framework of the Kaluza–Klein formulation extended to multidimensional gauge fields. In this framework, a fiber bundle is constructed with a horizontal, base space and a vertical, gauge space, which is a Lie group manifold, termed its structure group. For the present, the base is the Minkowski spacetime and the vertical space is the composite gauge group mentioned above. The fiber bundle is equipped with a Riemannian structure, which is used to obtain the classical description of motion of a spinor. In its classical picture, a Weyl spinor is found to behave as a spinning charged particle in translational motion. The corresponding quantum description is deduced from the Klein–Gordon equation in the Riemann spaces obtained by the methods of path-integration. This equation in the present fiber bundle reduces to the equation for a Weyl spinor, which is close to but differs somewhat from the squared Dirac equation. (shrink)

Frank Arntzenius has recently suggested that we should reject the standard view that the instantaneous state in classical mechanics consists of both the position and the velocity. In his view, the velocity as ordinarily defined-as the derivative of position with respect to time-cannot be genuinely instantaneous, and, thus, it should be excluded from the instantaneous state. After reviewing Bertrand Russell's traditional objections to the notion of an instantaneous velocity and suggesting that Russell's concerns can be effectively answered, I argue that (...) Arntzenius' attempt to show that the standard definition of velocity fails to yield an instantaneous property is not compelling either. Although I review several suggestions that Arntzenius makes against the existence of instantaneous velocity, much of his case rests upon an intuition, which has also appeared in the work of David Albert, about what is required of genuine instantaneous states. I argue in part that there is no reason to accept this intuition, and, thus, no reason to revise standard physical practice when it comes to the classical, instantaneous state. (shrink)

Wisely, the authors begin this book by describing it as a polemic. They argue that most contemporary analytic metaphysics is a waste of time and resources since contemporary ‘neo-scholastic’ metaphysical theorizing cannot hope to attain objective truth given its penchant for making a priori claims about the nature of the world which are backed up by appeal to intuition. In engaging in this activity, metaphysicians have, the authors claim, abandoned hope of locating any interesting connection between their metaphysical pronouncements and (...) how our best empirical theories describe the world. Moreover, the success attained by empirical science just cannot be matched by metaphysical theorizing and so, faced with this asymmetry, empirical science wins: a priori metaphysical theorizing must give way to a naturalistic form of metaphysics, a positive account of which the authors attempt to elucidate in the second and third, rather lengthy chapters of the book.The first chapter consists of a statement of the authors’ negative view, a vigorous, sustained and sometimes withering attack upon contemporary a priori metaphysics. Most ire is reserved for those who indulge in what the authors call ‘pseudo-scientific metaphysics’; that is, those who pay lip service to keeping their metaphysical speculation in tune with physics, only to constrain their ontology in such a way that the entities and processes within it do not even play a role in current physical theory, or are in straightforward contradiction with it. Much philosophy of science and scientific metaphysics is too superficial and simplistic to deserve the name and bears more relation to ‘the philosophy of “A” Level chemistry’. The guilty in this respect include David Lewis, Jaegwon Kim, Jonathan Lowe, Donald Davidson, Jerry Fodor, Crawford Elder, Trenton Merricks among …. (shrink)

SummaryAn accurate framework for interpreting Kant's theory of knowledge must clearly distinguish between the six terms he uses to describe the various stages in the epistemological development of the‘object’of knowledge. Kant portrays the object transcendentally in the first Critique as passing from an unknowable‘thing in itself through the intermediate stage of being a‘transcendental object’, and finally attaining the ideal status of an‘appearance’. When the object is considered empirically, it passes through three corresponding stages: the‘phenomenon’is the real object as known in (...) experience, the‘negative noumenon’limits our knowledge to its intuitive manifestation, and the‘positive noumenon’is that aspect of the known object which remains ultimately transcendent. (shrink)