Encouraging independent thinking skills for successful enquiries.

In this book, the author of But Why? explores how to maximise philosophical play through activities, games and parental engagement. Why Think?

Biological evolution provides a creative fount of complex and subtle adaptations, often surprising the scientists who discover them. However, because evolution is an algorithmic process that transcends the substrate in which it occurs, evolution’s creativity is not limited to nature. Indeed, many researchers in the field of digital evolution have observed their evolving algorithms and organisms subverting their intentions, exposing unrecognized bugs in their code, producing unexpected adaptations, or exhibiting outcomes uncannily convergent with ones in nature. Such stories routinely reveal (...) creativity by evolution in these digital worlds, but they rarely fit into the standard scientific narrative. Instead they are often treated as mere obstacles to be overcome, rather than results that warrant study in their own right. The stories themselves are traded among researchers through oral tradition, but that mode of information transmission is inefficient and prone to error and outright loss. Moreover, the fact that these stories tend to be shared only among practitioners means that many natural scientists do not realize how interesting and lifelike digital organisms are and how natural their evolution can be. To our knowledge, no collection of such anecdotes has been published before. This paper is the crowd-sourced product of researchers in the fields of artificial life and evolutionary computation who have provided first-hand accounts of such cases. It thus serves as a written, fact-checked collection of scientifically important and even entertaining stories. In doing so we also present here substantial evidence that the existence and importance of evolutionary surprises extends beyond the natural world, and may indeed be a universal property of all complex evolving systems. (shrink)

_Hermeneutics as Politics, _perhaps the most important critique of post-modern thought ever written, is here reissued in a special fifteenth anniversary edition. In a new foreword, Robert B. Pippin argues that the book has rightfully achieved the status of a classic. Rosen illuminates the underpinnings of post-modernist thought, providing valuable insight as he pursues two arguments: first, that post-modernism, which regards itself as an attack upon the Enlightenment, is in fact merely a continuation of Enlightenment thought; and second, that the (...) extraordinary contemporary emphasis upon hermeneutics is the latest consequence of the triumph of history over mathematics and science. “Perhaps the most original and philosophically important critical account of hermeneutics—of its philosophical status and historical development—to appear since Gadamer’s _Truth and Method._”—_Choice _ “A philosophical polemic of the highest order written in a language of unfailing verve and precision.... It will repay manyfold the labour of a slow and considered reading.”—J. M. Coetzee, _Upstream_. (shrink)

Alexandre Kojève, née Kojevnikov, was born in pre‐revolutionary Russia; his uncle was the painter Kandinsky, and Kojève planned originally to study art history. He was traveling in Italy when the Russian Revolution occurred, an event that caused him to change his plans and to devote himself to philosophy. He spent some years in Germany before emigrating to France, and was able to pursue the life of an independent scholar until the worldwide economic depression led to the loss of his family (...) income. Upon the invitation of Alexandre Koyré, Kojève began a series of lectures on Hegel in 1933 at the Ecole des Hautes Études. These lectures lasted until 1939; ostensibly devoted to Hegel's philosophy of religion, they in fact provided an exhaustive commentary on the Phenomenology of Spirit. (shrink)

The European Legacy, Volume 17, Issue 4, Page 560-561, July 2012.

This chapter introduces the thesis of contextualism about knowledge attributions, which is the view that the proposition expressed by a sentence such as ‘John knows that the bank is open at 2 p.m. EST on October 3, 2006’ varies depending upon the context of its utterance. Different versions of the thesis are explained.

What role does religious transcendence play in liberal democracies? In Jürgen Habermas’s early political theory of the bourgeois public sphere, religion was downplayed if not dismissed completely. In the past several years however, he has developed a greater interest in religion. Habermas seems to like the positive solidarity-forming effects religion can have on communities that mediate in a public sphere between private individuals and state authority. However, in light of continuing terrorist activity, he is deeply critical of any sort of (...) other worldly transcendence that is too open to violent cooption. Nonetheless, Habermas relates his renewal of a critically engaged public sphere of debate to universalized rational procedures which he discusses in light of a philosophical notion of “detranscendentalization.” However, if it is the case that the solidarity of communities is being eroded by the influences of mass media and free market globalization as Habermas claims, then a further reflection on the way religious communities form around shared transcendent beliefs is required. Are his detranscendentalized rational procedures of critical debate adequate in inspiring the critical power communities need to solidify themselves against state authority? It is in light of this questions that I will develop the thought of Karl Barth. (shrink)

Heidegger's phenomenological approach, as exhibited in Being and Time, provides a conceptual background to discussions in role?theory. His work was not meant as an empirical contribution to sociology, nor does he assimilate sociology to conceptual inquiry. Heidegger's contention is, rather, that if we understand the way in which human beings exist (the nature of Dasein) we shall understand why empirical role?theoretical inquiries are possible. Without experience, without paying attention to the facts of human life, there could be no phenomenological enterprise. (...) But by eliciting the fundamental structure of Dasein Heidegger has pointed to what makes the empirical data ultimately intelligible. The enterprise is a transcendental one, in the Kantian sense. (shrink)

Quantum stochastic models are developed within the framework of a measure entity. An entity is a structure that describes the tests and states of a physical system. A measure entity endows each test with a measure and equips certain sets of states as measurable spaces. A stochastic model consists of measurable realvalued function on the set of states, called a generalized action, together with measures on the measurable state spaces. This structure is then employed to compute quantum probabilities of test (...) outcomes. We characterize those measure entities that are isomorphic to a quantum probability space. We also show that stochastic models provide a phase space description of quantum mechanics and a realistic model of spin. (shrink)

Recognition of the narrative character of Christian convictions for the formation of the character of community and individuals is crucial for understanding how such convictions can be said to be true or false. In particular the truth of Christian convictions is revealed by their power to form and sustain a community capable of witnessing to the God of heaven and earth in a divided and violent world. The ethics of such a community contrasts sharply with those moral theories that ignore (...) or deny the narrative nature of morality by seeking to free ethics from the traditions of historic communities. The recognition of the narrative quality of moral reflection does not destroy the possibility of moral confrontation between different sets of convictions. The church serves the world best by providing categories of interpretation that help us understand the often tragic but hopeful character of our existence. (shrink)

Philosophy in the twentieth century has been dominated by the urge for analysis, a methodology that is supposed to be comparable in clarity and correctness to scientific thought. In this brilliant and devastating attack on such exaggerated claims, Stanley Rosen demonstrates how analysis alone lacks the power to approach the deepest and most important philosophical questions. He thus provides us with a new and deeper understanding of the nature and limits of analytic thinking.

We introduce and study the D-model, which reflects the simplest situation in which one wants to calibrate an observable. We discuss the question of representing the statistics of the D-model in the context of an effect algebra.