ABSTRACTThis article interrogates Jean-Louis Chrétien’s phenomenological appreciation of prayer as a call to the transcendent other, by juxtaposing it with the style and content of Augustine’s Confessions. In the Confessions, prayer is less the contradiction of presence than it is the paradox of simultaneous presence-and-absence, God being both the most intimate and the most remote at the same time. It is concluded that Chrétien’s phenomenology fails to understand prayer as the reciprocity it claims to articulate because, despite affirming both the (...) presence and the absence of God to the one praying, phenomenology cannot hold both these propositions in tension but must continually resolve them into a contradiction in which the subject ‘discovers’ God only by falling back on the self. The question is one of style and genre: Augustine’s speech addresses someone whereas Chrétien’s does not. In as much as he follows the phenomenological style established by Husserl, Chrétien cannot value any spe... (shrink)

History and Philosophy of Modern Mathematics was first published in 1988. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions. The fourteen essays in this volume build on the pioneering effort of Garrett Birkhoff, professor of mathematics at Harvard University, who in 1974 organized a conference of mathematicians and historians of modern mathematics to examine how the two disciplines approach the history of mathematics. In (...) History and Philosophy of Modern Mathematics, William Aspray and Philip Kitcher bring together distinguished scholars from mathematics, history, and philosophy to assess the current state of the field. Their essays, which grow out of a 1985 conference at the University of Minnesota, develop the basic premise that mathematical thought needs to be studied from an interdisciplinary perspective. The opening essays study issues arising within logic and the foundations of mathematics, a traditional area of interest to historians and philosophers. The second section examines issues in the history of mathematics within the framework of established historical periods and questions. Next come case studies that illustrate the power of an interdisciplinary approach to the study of mathematics. The collection closes with a look at mathematics from a sociohistorical perspective, including the way institutions affect what constitutes mathematical knowledge. (shrink)

In twentieth-century France, the word “metaphysics” had connotations of closed systems which claimed certainty for themselves. As a result, few dared to engage in metaphysical speculation. Ricœur, however, rejected this prevalent definition because he believed it came from Heidegger’s procrustean reading of the history of philosophy. While agreeing that certainty and closure were neither desirable nor possible, Ricœur did make metaphysical claims. Following Jaspers’s revival of pre-modern apophatic metaphysics for which transcendence cannot be comprehended, Ricœur, in his early work, argued (...) for “critical realism” against neo-Kantian idealism, “original affirmation” against Sartrean negativity, and the “metaphysical choice” of human freedom’s consent to the unchosen features of reality. (shrink)

Rage against the system : the unity of truth -- A philosophy of hope? The universality of truth -- Absolutely no absolutes? Ricœur's encounter with Thévenaz -- Finitude and the infinite : the God of the philosophers -- Finitude and evil : the crucial distinction -- Rightly relating evil and finitude -- The poetic symbol of creation -- The mysterious unity of creation -- The original goodness of creation -- Conclusion. New frontiers between philosophy and theology.

This article compares two attempts to return to realism after Kant’s ‘Copernican Revolution’. Quentin Meillassoux, representing the ‘speculative realism’ school, rejects both Kantian and post-Kantian idealism in favour of a materialism based on the epistemology of the modern sciences. But Meillassoux is unaware of the element of choice in his philosophical position, and he does not solve the essential problem posed by idealism which concerns the place of the subject in being. Ricœur, on the other hand, sublates Kant by a (...) deeper embrace of finitude that leads to the self-displacement of the subject, and a ‘Second Copernican Revolution’, one that he freely admits can only be arrived at by Jaspersian ‘Philosophical Faith’. The article concludes by showing how crossing the border into theological faith offers a virtue-ethical perspective on the question of realism and idealism: it is in fact the choice between a childlike humility that receives reality as it is, and an arrogant self-positing that puts the subject in the position of God. (shrink)

Fake News Nation tells the story of how false information has flooded American public life for over 230 years. The authors show how lies, misrepresentations, and rumors have drawn America into wars, covered up assassinations, influenced national elections, and impacted contentious policy issues such as the effects of smoking and climate change.

"Martin Campbell-Kelly; William Aspray; Nathan Ensmenger; Jeffery R. Yost. Computer: A History of the Information Machine." Isis, 105 (3), September 2014, pp. 622-623.

Kitcher and Aspray distinguish a mainstream tradition in the philosophy of mathematics concerned with foundationalist epistemology, and a ‘maverick’ or naturalistic tradition, originating with Lakatos. My claim is that if the consequences of Lakatos's contribution are fully worked out, no less than a radical reconceptualization of the philosophy of mathematics is necessitated, including history, methodology and a fallibilist epistemology as central to the field. In the paper an interpretation of Lakatos's philosophy of mathematics is offered, followed by some critical (...) discussion, and an extension to a social constructivist position (which might well have been unacceptable to Lakatos). (shrink)

In the popular imagination, the relevance of Turing's theoretical ideas to people producing actual machines was significant and appreciated by everybody involved in computing from the moment he published his 1936 paper ‘On Computable Numbers’. Careful historians are aware that this popular conception is deeply misleading. We know from previous work by Campbell-Kelly, Aspray, Akera, Olley, Priestley, Daylight, Mounier-Kuhn, Haigh, and others that several computing pioneers, including Aiken, Eckert, Mauchly, and Zuse, did not depend on Turing's 1936 universal-machine concept. (...) Furthermore, it is not clear whether any substance in von Neumann's celebrated 1945 ‘First Draft Report on the EDVAC’ is influenced in any identifiable way by Turing's work. This raises the questions: When does Turing enter the field? Why did the Association for Computing Machinery honor Turing by associating his name to ACM's most prestigious award, the Turing Award? Previous authors have.. (shrink)

When John von Neumann turned his interest to computers, he was one of the leading mathematicians of his time. In the 1940s, he helped design two of the first stored-program digital electronic computers. He authored reports explaining the functional organization of modern computers for the first time, thereby influencing their construction worldwide (von Neumann, 1945; Burks et al., 1946). In the first of these reports, von Neumann described the computer as analogous to a brain, with an input “organ” (analogous to (...) sensory neurons), a memory, an arithmetical and a logical “organ” (analogous to associative neurons), and an output “organ” (analogous to motor neurons). His experience with computers convinced him that brains and computers, both having to do with the processing of information, should be studied by a new discipline–automata theory. In fact, according to von Neumann, automata theory would cover not only computers and brains, but also any biological or artificial systems that dealt with information and control, including robots and genes. Von Neumann never formulated a full-blown mathematical theory of automata, but he wrote several important exploratory papers (von Neumann, 1951, 1956, 1966). Meanwhile, besides designing hardware, he developed some of the first programs, programming languages, programming techniques, and numerical methods for solving mathematical problems using computers. (Much of his work on computing is reprinted in Aspray and Burks, 1987.) Shortly before his death in 1956, he wrote an informal synthesis of his views about brains. Though von Neumann left his manuscript sketchy and unfinished, Yale University Press published it as The Com- puter and the Brain in 1958. The 2000 reprint of this small but informative book is an opportunity to learn, or be reminded of, von Neumann’s thoughts on the computational organization of the mind-brain. Von Neumann began by explaining computers, which for him were essentially number crunchers: to compute was “to operate on .. (shrink)