This work is derived from the SERC "Logic for IT" Summer School Conference on Proof Theory held at Leeds University. The contributions come from acknowledged experts and comprise expository and research articles which form an invaluable introduction to proof theory aimed at both mathematicians and computer scientists.

In the summer of 1977, as I was preparing to teach Jacques Derrida’s Of Grammatology to a class at the School of Criticism and Theory in Irvine, a card floated out of the text and presented itself for interpretation. It read:WITH THE COMPLIMENTS OF THE AUTHORImmediately I was faced with an interpretive problem not only in the ordinary and everyday sense of having to determine the meaning and the intention of the utterance but in the special sense occasioned by the (...) fact that I didn’t know who the author named or, rather, not named by the card was. It might have been Derrida himself whom I had met, but only in passing. Or it might have been Derrida’s translator, Gayatri Spivak whom I had known for some time and who might well have put me on the publisher’s list. Or it might have been the publisher, in this case the Johns Hopkins University Press of whose editorial board I was then a member. In the absence of any explicit identification, I found myself a very emblem of the difficulties or infelicities that attend distanced or etiolated communication: unable to proceed because the words were cut off from their anchoring source in a unique and clearly present intention. That is to say, I seemed, in the very moment of my perplexity, to be proving on my pulse the superiority of face-to-face communication, where one can know intentions directly, to communication mediated by the marks of writing and in this case by a writing that materialized without any clues as to its context of origin. It may not have been a message found in a bottle, but it certainly was a message found in a book. (shrink)

Together Professor Bush and Mr. Mailloux present a problem in interpretation not unlike those that were the occasion of the paper they criticize: Professor Bush takes the first section of the paper more seriously than I do, and Mr. Mailloux complains that I do not take it seriously enough. In their different ways they seem to miss or slight the playfulness of my performance, the degree to which it is an attempt to be faithful to my admitted unwillingness to come (...) to, or rest on, a point. Professor Bush seems to think that I am mounting an attack on the Variorum. Let me say at the outset that I intended no such attack, that I am sorry if anything I wrote gave that impression, and that I regret any offense that may have been taken. Professor Bush and I view the Variorum from different perspectives, both of which seem to me to be perfectly legitimate. He views it as a document, while I view it as a text. As a document, as a record and history of research and interpretation, it is a model of its kind, full, judicious, and above all, honest. The editors pay us the compliment of not pretending to an impossible objectivity. They leave us the valuable record of their own occasional disagreements, and thus suggest that they know very well that theirs is an interim report. My inquiry is into the significance of that report; it is not a brief against the compiling of its materials but an attempt to put to them a question the editors quite properly do not ask: what does the history of the effort to determine the meaning of Milton's poems mean? In short, I am extending the scope of interpretation to include the interpreters themselves and, rather than attacking the Variorum, taking one step further the task it has so well begun. Stanley E. Fish's "How to Do Things with Austin and Searle: Speech Act Theory and Literary Criticism" was published in the Special Centennial Issue of Modern Language Notes, Summer 1976. His contributions to Critical Inquiry include "Facts and Fictions: A Reply to Ralph Rader" , "Interpreting the Variorum" , "Normal Circumstances, Literal Language, Direct Speech Acts, the Ordinary, the Everyday, the Obvious, What Goes without Saying, and Other Special Cases" , "A Reply to John Reichert; or, How to Stop Worrying and Learn to Love Interpretation" , and "One More Time". (shrink)

Eastern Orthodox Christianity carries forward a moral tradition from the earliest Christian period, in the belief that scriptural and patristic teaching remains applicable to the contemporary economic sphere of life. The Church Fathers focused on the ownership of property and the ethical acquisition of wealth and its use; they stressed special concern for the poor and disadvantaged. Carried forward through the Byzantine and modern eras, these early Christian understandings now can be applied through a basic and elementary natural law morality (...) to business activities. The Orthodox approach embodies traditional virtue and character ethics as well. The essay concludes by applying these Orthodox approaches to two current issues: the charging of interest and internet ethics. (shrink)

This book examines the underlying theoretical issues concerning the nature of political freedom. Arguing that most previous discussions of such freedom have been too narrowly focused, it explores both conservativism from Edmund Burke to its present resurgence, the radical tradition of Karl Marx, as well as the orthodox liberal model of freedom of John Locke, John Stuart Mill and Isaiah Berlin. Political Freedom argues that these three accounts of political freedom - conservative, liberal and radical - all have internal weaknesses (...) which render them unsatisfactory. In the second part of the book George Brenkert develops an alternative theory of political freedom. Using the guiding concept of empowerment, his model explores individual rights, democratic participation in government and workplace, and the need to provide the material and educational resources to allow individuals to effectively exercise their rights to self-determination. It is a clear and bold attack on the view that there is no link between freedom and power. (shrink)

This article seeks to identify some of the major perspectives in Eastern Orthodox Christianity which provide direction for bioethical-decision making. The article first identifies some historical, theological, and liturgical sources in the Eastern Orthodox tradition which have implications for bioethics. The manuscript also seeks to address the question of the place of religious bioethics within public discussion of issues in bioethics and health care policy. Keywords: bioethics, Eastern Orthodox, faith, liturgy, secular, tradition CiteULike Connotea Del.icio.us What's this?

This book demonstrates how an interest in political argument leads naturally to a philosophical way of thinking. It analyses both practising politicans and political theorists and is a much needed introudction to two vitally important, and independent, disciplines.

Clearly and succinctly describes the standards of God-like living as taught by the Orthodox Church. Eleven chapters deal with our relationships with God, our selves and our neighbors from both the personal and churchly perspectives. Readers will find it a veritable source book of biblical and patristic material on the practical aspects of Orthodox life. Among the topics covered are issues of personal religious life, family life, sex ethics, bioethics, the Christian and culture, the state, peace and war, economic responsibilities, (...) inter-church relations and hundreds of other ethics-related issues. Thoroughly indexed, the material in the book is easy to get to for reference. 2nd printing. (shrink)

ABSTRACT In the course of her defence of German protesters against Peter Singer's lectures, Jenny Teichman claims that the right to make use of a public platform is not covered by the principle of freedom of expression. I argue that this view is mistaken, and that she is also wrong to focus on whether Singer deserved a public platform. Instead I suggest that what matters is whether there was an attempt to prevent communication between a speaker and willing hearers. But (...) I agree with Teichman that there are some relevant differences between speaking from a public platform and speaking privately. In particular I argue that protesters have a right, though not one based on freedom of expression, to interrupt a public speaker. Such a right is on a par with the speaker's freedom to draw public attention to the fact that she has opinions which she thinks worthy of a hearing, and in exercising it a protester must not prevent those who wish to hear the speech from doing so. Finally I offer an argument against the view that disrupting Singer's lectures could be seen as a justified interference with freedom of expression. (shrink)

The class of all recursive functions fails to possess a natural hierarchical structure, generated predicatively from "within". On the other hand, many (proof-theoretically significant) sub-recursive classes do. This paper attempts to measure the limit of predicative generation in this context, by classifying and characterizing those (predictably terminating) recursive functions which can be successively defined according to an autonomy condition of the form: allow recursions only over well-orderings which have already been "coded" at previous levels. The question is: how can a (...) recursion code a well-ordering? The answer lies in Girard's theory of dilators, but is reworked here in a quite different and simplified framework specific to our purpose. The "accessible" recursive functions thus generated turn out to be those provably recursive in $(\prod_{1}^{1}-CA)_{0}$. (shrink)

Girard’s maxim, that Peano Arithmetic is a theory of one inductive definition, is re-examined in the light of a weak theory EA formalising basic principles of Nelson’s predicative Arithmetic.

Wilfred Sieg and Stanley S. Wainer. Program Transformation and Proof Transformation.

Book reviewed in this article: Rights and Advocacy for Retarded People. By Stanley S. Herr. Lexington.

Following our [6], though with somewhat different methods here, further variants of Goodstein sequences are introduced in terms of parameterized Ackermann–Péter functions. Each of the sequences is shown to terminate, and the proof-theoretic strengths of these facts are calibrated by means of ordinal assignments, yielding independence results for a range of theories: PRA, PA,$\Sigma ^1_1$-DC$_0$, ATR$_0$, up to ID$_1$. The key is the so-called “Hardy hierarchy” of proof-theoretic bounding finctions, providing a uniform method for associating Goodstein-type sequences with parameterized normal (...) form representations of positive integers. (shrink)

In the summer of 2019, the Cavell family, acting as literary executors of Stanley Cavell's estate, designated Eric Ritter to organize and catalogue the masses of books and documents and papers with which Cavell had filled his study. In the process, Ritter found a surprising amount of unpublished work and presents some of it here for the first time. Building on the archival work as well as on recent scholarship, this article presents Cavell's conception of philosophy as the public (...) expression of moral perfectionist practice, for which writing is catalyst, medium, and result. The article then enumerates some consequences that follow from this conception, especially a certain relation of philosophy to the arts and to a notion of philosophical pluralism. It also suggests that key themes in Cavell's work already converse implicitly with ongoing debates about “American Philosophy” and have great potential to do so more explicitly. (shrink)

There is a very simple way in which the safe/normal variable discipline of Bellantoni–Cook recursion [S. Bellantoni, S. Cook, A new recursion theoretic characterization of the polytime functions, Computational Complexity 2 97–110] can be imposed on arithmetical theories like PA: quantify over safes and induct on normals. This weakens the theory severely, so that the provably recursive functions become more realistically computable . Earlier results of D. Leivant [Intrinsic theories and computational complexity, in: D. Leivant , Logic and Computational Complexity, (...) Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol. 960, Springer-Verlag, 1995, pp. 177–194] are re-worked and extended in this new context, giving proof-theoretic characterizations of complexity classes between Grzegorczyk’s E2 and E3. (shrink)

John Reichert and Stanley Fish, in their discussion of the finding of different "meanings" in Samson Agonistes,1 do not seem to recognize what is really in dispute between them. Certainly they step in to further confusions along the way. It is true that, as Fish reiterates, the "meaning" which is to be cumulatively grasped from a total work of art, such as a long dramatic poem or novel, is open in principle to unlimited divergencies of interpretation on the basis (...) of either external facts that can be brought to bear on the work or hypotheses that can be counted or presented as potentially relevant. This is so not only because people differ in their understandings in a great variety of ways but also because the fundamental indeterminacy of language—as distinct from the ambiguity of particular statements2—is capable of being understood as such. · 1. John Reichert, "But That Was in Another Ball Park: A Reply to Stanley Fish," Critical Inquiry 6 : 164-72; Stanley E. Fish, "A Reply to John Reichert; or, How to Stop Worrying and Learn to Love Interpretation," Critical Inquiry 6 : 173-78. Fish's original essay, "Normal Circumstances . . . and Other Special Cases," appeared in the Summer 1978 issue.· 2. See for this distinction my remarks in "On the Recognition and Identification of Objects in Paintings," Critical Inquiry 3 : 702. Mark Roskill, professor of art history at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, is the author of Van Gogh, Gauguin, and the Impressionist Circle, and What is Art History? He has contributed "On the Recognition and Identification of Objects in Paintings" to the Summer 1977 issue of Critical Inquiry. (shrink)