Vagueness is the study of concepts that admit borderline cases. The epistemology of vagueness concerns attitudes we should have towards propositions we know to be borderline. On this basis Andrew Bacon develops a new theory of vagueness in which vagueness is fundamentally a property of propositions, explicated in terms of its role in thought.

Programmed cell death (PCD) in unicellular organisms is in some instances an altruistic trait. When the beneficiaries are clones or close kin, kin selection theory may be used to explain the evolution of the trait, and when the trait evolves in groups of distantly related individuals, group or multilevel selection theory is invoked. In mixed microbial communities, the benefits are also available to unrelated taxa. But the evolutionary ecology of PCD in communities is poorly understood. Few hypotheses have been offered (...) concerning the community role of PCD despite its far-reaching effects. The hypothesis we consider here is that PCD is a black queen. The Black Queen Hypothesis (BQH) outlines how public goods arising from a leaky function are exploited by other taxa in the community. Black Queen (BQ) traits are essential for community survival, but only some members bear the cost of possessing them, while others lose the trait In addition, BQ traits have been defined in terms of adaptive gene loss, and it is unknown whether this has occurred for PCD. Our conclusion is that PCD fulfils the two most important criteria of a BQ (leakiness and costliness), but that more empirical data are needed for assessing the remaining two criteria. In addition, we hold that for viewing PCD as a BQ, the original BQH needs to include social traits. Thus, despite some empirical and conceptual shortcomings, the BQH provides a helpful avenue for investigating PCD in microbial communities. (shrink)

In this book about metaphysics the author defends a realistic view of universals, characterizing the notion of universal by considering language and logic, the idea of possibility, hierarchies of universals, and causation. He argues that neither language nor logic is a reliable guide to the nature of reality and that basic universals are the fundamental type of universal and are central to causation. All assertions and predications about the natural world are ultimately founded on these basic universals. A distinction is (...) drawn between unified particulars and arbitrary particulars ; unified particulars are the terms of causal relations and thus the real constituents of the world. The world is not made up of events but of unified particulars and basic universals. (shrink)

Pop and camp nostalgia for the lofty ziggurats, teardrop automobiles, sleek ships of the airstream, and even the alien BEMs with imperiled women in their clutches, are one thing; the cyberpunk critique of “wrongheadedness,” whether in Gibson’s elegant fiction or Sterling’s flip criticism, is another. Each provides us with a stylized way of approaching SF’s early formative years, years usually described as “uncritical” in their outlook on technological progress. But neither perspective can give us much sense of the sociohistorical landscape (...) of the thirties on which these gleaming technofantasies were raised. To have some idea of the historical power of what Gibson calls the “Gernsback Continuum,” we need to know more, for example, about the entrepreneurial activities and scientific convictions of Hugo Gernsback himself, a man often termed the “father” of science fiction because he presided over its market specialization as a cultural genre. In Gernsback’s view, SF was more of a social than a literary movement. We need to know more about the hallowed place of engineers and scientists in public consciousness in the years of boom and crisis between the wars, the consolidation of industrial research science at the heart of corporate capitalism, and the redemptive role cast for technology in the drama of national recovery and growth. We also need to know about the traditions of progressive thought that stood behind the often radical technocratic philosophy of progressive futurism in the thirties. My description of North American SF’s period of genre formation will show the crucial influence of the national cults of science, engineering, and invention as well as discuss the role of technocracy in the social thought of the day. I will also consider the ways in which pulp SF escaped or resisted the recruitist role allotted to it not only by shaping figures like Gernsback, who devoted himself directly to enlisting his readers in the cause of “science,” but also by subsequent critics of early SF, including those writers, like Gibson and Sterling, who have lamented its naïve celebration of technological innovation. Andrew Ross teaches English at Princeton University and is the author of The Failure of Modernism: Symptoms of American Poetry and No Respect: Intellectuals and Popular Culture . He is also the editor of Universal Abandon?: The Politics of Postmodernism and the coeditor, with Constance Penley, of Technoculture. (shrink)

Christians and Marxists have co-operated in various forms of political work in recent decades, and, after earlier years of antagonism, thinkers on both sides have come to take the other seriously. The aim of this book is to get Christianity and Marxism to meet on terrain on which they might seem most opposed: their philosophical positions; and to do so without watering either down, but taking then full strength.

introduction to the model of human agency -- Human agency -- Circle within a circle -- Communication over intervention -- Objective function -- Economic resources -- Resource allocation -- Risk, returns & rewards -- Risk aversion -- Individual investment -- Organization investment -- The law of proportion -- Heart capital -- Heart labor -- Territory -- Information asymmetry -- Monitoring and bonding -- Testing.

Decoherence results from the dissipative interaction between a quantum system and its environment. As the system and environment become entangled, the reduced density operator describing the system "decoheres" into a mixture (with the interference terms damped out). This formal result prompts some to exclaim that the measurement problem is solved. I will scrutinize this claim by examining how modal and relative-state interpretations can use decoherence. Although decoherence cannot rescue these interpretations from general metaphysical difficulties, decoherence may help these interpretations to (...) pick out a preferred basis. I will explore whether decoherence solves nagging technical problems associated with selecting a preferred basis. (shrink)

This book, the first to explore religious education and post-modernity in depth, sets out to provide a much needed examination of the problems and possibilities post-modernity raises for religious education.

This dissertation evaluates the efforts of modern philosophers of aesthetics and politics to distinguish judgment from both cognition and volition. To see the rule under which any given particular is to be subsumed as a law fabricated and imposed by either God or reason is to characterize free judgment in terms of sovereignty. This generates the skeptical dilemma of an infinite regress of the legitimacy of the rule's application that can only be avoided by seeing the act of judgment as (...) an act of will. Such a voluntarist account of politics and judgment must in the end deny plurality for identity, and efface the categorical Aristotelian distinction between the public and the private. The rejection of the teleology of publicity is thus tied to the collapse of phronesis back into a Platonic techne that strives to produce society and man in the image of the eidos. ;Three "solutions" to this aporia are considered. The first is Hannah Arendt's appropriation for politics of Kant's aesthetic judgment, which allows for categorical distinctions between the public and the private and between judgment and the observance of rules. This project fails on account of the extreme formalism of that aesthetics. The second reads the third Critique as an allegory of politics. This too fails, as Kant's aesthetic community relies upon the productive legislation of the genius, a figure whose lineage reaches back to the half divine, half bestial figure of Machiavelli's founding prince. The third is a direct return to Aristotle. While his ethical philosophy offers us our best account of phronesis and epieikeia, it does not sufficiently engage the motivations for its own rejection. Hobbes, Locke, and Kant were not so taken with the model of mechanistic science that they simply forgot that in their common lives they regularly made judgments without the implicit or explicit guidance of a rule. The modern is better seen as a Weltanschauung, less a description that might be right or wrong than a desire. The alternative to the aporia of judgment is not found in the aesthetic but in a Wittgensteinian form of philosophical therapy. (shrink)

Immanuel Kants three critiques the Critique of Pure Reason, the Critique of Practical Reason and the Critique of Judgment are among the pinnacles of Western Philosophy. This accessible study grounds Kants philosophical position in the context of his intellectual influences, most notably against the background of the scepticism and empiricism of David Hume. It is an ideal critical introduction to Kants views in the key areas of knowledge and metaphysics; morality and freedom; and beauty and design. By examining the Kantian (...) system in the light of contemporary arguments, Ward brings the structure and force of Kants Copernican Revolution in Philosophy into sharp focus. Kant is often misrepresented as a somewhat dry thinker, yet the clarity of Wards exposition of his main themes, science, morality and aesthetics, through the three critiques brings his writings and theories to life. Lucidly and persuasively written, this book will be a valuable resource for students and scholars seeking to understand Kants immense influence. (shrink)

In constructing the three-valued logic, Jan Łukasiewicz was highly inspirited by the Aristotelian idea of logical contingency. Nevertheless, we can construct a four-valued logic for explicating the Stoic idea of logical determinacy. In this system, we have the following truth values: 0 (‘possibly false), 1 (‘necessarily false’), 2 (‘possibly true’), 3 (‘necessarily true’), where the designated truth value is represented by the two values: 2 and 3.

Originally published: Philadelphia: Saunders College Pub., c1990.

Field theories have been central to physics over the last 150 years, and there are several theories in contemporary physics in which physical fields play key causal and explanatory roles. This paper proposes a novel field trope-bundle (FTB) ontology on which fields are composed of bundles of particularized property instances, called tropes and goes on to describe some virtues of this ontology. It begins with a critical examination of the dominant view about the ontology of fields, that fields are properties (...) of a substantial substratum. (shrink)