The notion of measurement plays a central role in human cognition. We measure people’s height, the weight of physical objects, the length of stretches of time, or the size of various collections of individuals. Measurements of height, weight, and the like are commonly thought of as mappings between objects and dense scales, while measurements of collections of individuals, as implemented for instance in counting, are assumed to involve discrete scales. It is also commonly assumed that natural language makes use (...) of both types of scales and subsequently distinguishes between two types of measurements. This paper argues against the latter assumption. It argues that natural language semantics treats all measurements uniformly as mappings from objects (individuals or collections of individuals) to dense scales, hence the Universal Density of Measurement (UDM). If the arguments are successful, there are a variety of consequences for semantics and pragmatics, and more generally for the place of the linguistic system within an overall architecture of cognition. (shrink)

The reason for physics’ failure to find a final theory of the universe is examined. Problems identified are: the lack of unequivocal definitions for its fundamental elements (time, length, mass, electric charge, energy, work, matter-waves); the danger of relying too much on mathematics for solutions; especially as philosophical arguments conclude the universe cannot have a mathematical basis. It does not even need the concept of number to exist. Numbers and mathematics are human inventions arising from the human (...) predilection for measurement. Following Aristotle, a single fundamental cause is proposed to explore the efficacy of using pure non-mathematical philosophy to explain the universe, contrary to current quantum physical views. The cause is taken as Time, which is then defined, surprisingly leading automatically to a definition of a three-dimensional space answering the question into what can a universe be placed (space before space seems non-sensical). This enables the philosophical arguments to derive a universal rule giving clear-cut descriptions (definitions) of force (both gravitational and electromagnetic), motion, energy, and particles. The formation of atomic nuclei and atomic properties together with an unexpected role for neutrinos follow. In particular, a Popper-test can be prepared by introducing the concept of measurement to allow the philosophy arguments to be tested in another discipline - mathematics. The solution agrees with human physical observations to a remarkable degree of accuracy, automatically explaining and predicting values for Planck’s and the fine-structure constants. Although mathematical, it is included as confirming the efficacy of philosophy in attaining a final theory. (shrink)

The Successive Addition Argument (SAA) is one of the arguments proposed by the defenders of the Kalām Cosmological Argument to support the claim that the universe has a beginning. The main premise of SAA states that a collection formed by successive addition cannot be an actual infinite. This premise is challenged by an argument originally proposed by Fred Dretske. According to Dretske’s Argument (DA), the scenario of a counter who starts counting numbers and never stops can provide a counterexample (...) to the main premise of SAA. I argue that neither DA nor its past-oriented counterpart—which discusses the scenario of a counter who has always been counting negative integers from the infinite past—can play a decisive role in our evaluation of the strength of the arguments that are intended to establish the finitude of the past based on the impossibility of an actually infinite number of successive additions. (shrink)

There are good reasons to think there is a universal, fundamental length, specifically, at the order of the Planck length. If this holds, we then have an empirical answer for Zeno’s paradox of Achilles and the tortoise, a potential impasse in the second premise of the kalam cosmological argument, and creation ex nihilo. In this paper, I establish metaphysical, empirical, and epistemic reasons suggesting there is a universal, fundamental length. Along the way, I propose a “contingent necessity” (...) for such a notion. I then detail how a universal, fundamental length is a preferred solution for issues –. (shrink)

This paper investigates the structure and composition of the social network formed on the campus of the Faculty of Economics and Business of Diego Portales University, Chile, exposing a series of characteristics that are aligned with similar research in the field of networks. We use a model of social networks formation in order to understand socioeconomic and academic factors that predict the formation of friendship between two students. Specifically, we test empirically our model, using students' administrative information. Of special interest (...) is the impact of the length of stay of the students in the university, with which we refer to the years completed in the degree course, in the probability of establishing friendship ties where being socioeconomically different is a condition. The mechanism behind a result like this is the sense of belongingness that being part of the same institution may induce amongst students. By means of counterfactual simulations we found evidence in favor that passing through the university increases the probability of forming friendship networks, which can mean a kind of social capital, thus reducing socioeconomic segregation from the Chilean school system. Given the importance of this finding, we believe that policies that increase the sense of belongingness such as cultural events, leaderships programs, and community should be implemented on university campuses. (shrink)

It is shown that, due to Rosenfeld's inequality relations, there is no possibility of defining states of the Friedmann universe in a physically sensible manner when the world radius becomes equal to or smaller than Planck's length.

In this paper we prove that $\forall \textrm{FO}$, the universal fragment of first-order logic, is superfluous in $\varSigma _2^p$ and $\varPi _2^p$. As an example, we show that this yields a syntactic proof of the $\varSigma _2^p$-completeness of value-cost satisfiability. The superfluity method is interesting since it gives a way to prove completeness of problems involving numerical data such as lengths, weights and costs and it also adds to the programme started by Immerman and Medina about the syntactic approach in (...) the study of completeness. (shrink)

In this article, Professors Wolff and Koppelman offer a critical analysis of the free speech claims that were asserted by the law schools and law faculty that sought to challenge the Solomon Amendment. Solomon is a federal statute that requires law schools to grant full and equal access to military recruiters during the student interview season. The military discriminates against gay men and lesbians under its t Ask, Don policy, and the law professors claimed a right to exclude the military (...) under the First Amendment doctrine of arguing that the presence of discriminatory recruiters would interfere with the ability of faculty to express their own message of inclusion toward their gay students. Those claims were ultimately rejected by the Supreme Court in Rumsfeld v. FAIR. Wolff and Koppelman argue that the law professors' litigation efforts, though well intentioned, were deeply misguided, seeking to extend a recent and aberrational decision in the law of expressive association to unsustainable lengths and, in the process, offering a characterization of the manner in which faculty engage in their own expression that is inconsistent with the ideals that should govern institutions of higher learning. (shrink)

This volume is by no means out of place for a reader in the twenty first century as resemblances between the age of the machine and our own digital age are surprisingly numerous, particularly with reference to the patterns of intellectual response to unprecedented stimuli. The worrisome parallelisms and analogues are purposefully kept off stage for the imaginative audience to complement the plot of the real drama of the Industrial Revolution as it was witnessed by such imaginative medievalist 'knights' as (...) Carlyle, Cobbett, Southey, Pugin, Ruskin and Morris, intelligent thinkers who performed the universal 'type' rather than the subjective or egocentric in so far as their intellectual responses to the discrepancy between two dissimilar epochs was concerned. The reader is, therefore, expected to be engaged with the arguments of the 'neo-feudal', the 'moral-aesthetic' and the utopian 'social-aesthetic' arguments at the core of the book both imaginatively and intellectually. On the first level, he is requested to shuttle between two centuries separated by the length of a different century. On the second, however, he is expected not only to appreciate the artistically excellent literary works of prominent belletrists, but also to examine the clever polemics they developed as methods of treatment and persuasion aiming at a solution of the social and psychological problems that arose from the incongruity between the present and the past, with specific references to such significant concepts as those of time, history, progress and authority which are examined against the superheated touchstones of democratization, liberty, laissez-faire ethics, mechanization, poverty and social protest in the industrial city. (shrink)

Selling science has become a common practice in contemporary universities. This commodification of academia pervades many aspects of higher education, including research, teaching, and administration. As such, it raises significant philosophical, political, and moral challenges. This volume offers the first book-length analysis of this disturbing trend from a philosophical perspective and presents views by scholars of philosophy of science, social and political philosophy, and research ethics. The epistemic and moral responsibilities of universities, whether for-profit or nonprofit, are examined from (...) several philosophical standpoints. The contributors discuss the pertinent epistemological and methodological questions, the sociopolitical issues of the organization of science, the tensions between commodified practices and the ideal of “science for the public good,” and the role of governmental regulation and personal ethical behavior. In order to counter coercive and corruptive influences of academic commodification, the contributors consider alternatives to commodified research and offer practical recommendations for establishing appropriate research standards, methodologies and institutional arrangements, and a corresponding normative ethos. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Method and Mathematics:Peter Ramus's Histories of the SciencesRobert GouldingPeter Ramus (1515–72) was, at first sight, the least likely person to write an influential history of mathematics. For one thing, he was clearly no great mathematician himself. His sympathetic biographer Nicholas Nancel related that Ramus would spend the mornings being coached in mathematics by a team of experts he had assembled, and in the afternoon would lecture on the very (...) same subjects.1 But there can be no doubt that Ramus held mathematics in particular esteem and even played a crucial role in linking philosophical discourse to mathematics and in promoting the use of quadrivial reasoning in the study of the natural world.2The origins for his enthusiasm for mathematics are to be found in his account of the nature of the arts and critique of the curriculum of the universities. From his earliest career, Ramus was a logician and remained one in all his works, whether writing on mathematics or Virgil, and he conceived [End Page 63] of all the arts, especially mathematics, as unchanging structures of necessarily true propositions—not prima facie a position which lends itself to notions of historical change and development.3 His career as a historian of mathematics, I will argue, was directed by problems that arose in his theoretical understanding of mathematics as he began to immerse himself in the sciences of the ancient world.Ramus and the Reform of DialecticRamus set out his fundamental logical positions in his very first printed work, the Dialecticae institutiones (Education in Dialectic) of 1543, a contribution to the ongoing humanist attack on scholastic logic, in which Ramus rehearsed many of the commonplace criticisms of the university dialectic. Humanists complained that logic no longer concerned itself with real human reasoning; instead, it had become a discipline studied for its own sake, using its own incomprehensible jargon, and was of no practical interest. The new humanist dialectics of Lorenzo Valla and Rudolph Agricola attempted to teach the kind of practical reasoning useful for composing a speech or letter, and they borrowed extensively from rhetorical works of Cicero and Quintilian to develop a highly rhetoricized logic. Questions about the formal validity of arguments were of little interest; what mattered was whether the arguments were persuasive.4In his Dialecticae institutiones, Ramus took this humanist reformulation of dialectic a step further. Dialectic—or, in fact, any art or science—consisted of nature, doctrine, and exercise. The natural workings of the mind formed the most significant element. Doctrine was nothing more than a record of natural reasoning; in importance it paled next to nature and practice.5 The logic of the universities bore no resemblance to the true, natural dialectic, as he argued at length in the companion volume to the Institutiones, the innocuously titled but exuberantly offensive Aristotelicae animadversiones [End Page 64] (Observations on Aristotle).6 The question, then, remained: how can we gain access to this "natural reasoning"?Ramus's answer was surprising. He asks us to find a group of men—not scholars, but completely uneducated vineyard workers. Question them about the coming year: the fertility of the soil, the quality and quantity of the crop. "And then," he writes "from their minds as from a mirror an image of nature will be reflected."7 In the reasoned replies of these uneducated men, says Ramus, we discover every part of logic needed for any purpose, whether everyday discourse or composition of poetry: the invention of arguments, the assessment of their truth and their proper and orderly presentation. Other humanists had praised man's natural logical faculties, elevating them over artificial technique, but Ramus was the first to look beyond the walls of the university and the writings of the ancients to find natural dialectic at work.If even the uneducated have some possession of the arts, then the arts taught at the university should do no more than clear away the misleading junk in the mind, and allow its natural clarity to shine through.8 Logic should be easy to learn—not because this is a pedagogic ideal, but from the very nature of the art. And if logic as it is... (shrink)

Using the artificial language paradigm, we studied the acquisition of morphophonemic alternations with exceptions by 160 German adult learners. We tested the acquisition of two types of alternations in two regularity conditions while additionally varying length of training. In the first alternation, a vowel harmony, backness of the stem vowel determines backness of the suffix. This process is grounded in substance (phonetic motivation), and this universal phonetic factor bolsters learning a generalization. In the second alternation, tenseness of the stem (...) vowel determines backness of the suffix vowel. This process is not based in substance, but it reflects a phonotactic property of German and our participants benefit from this language-specific factor. We found that learners use both cues, while substantive bias surfaces mainly in the most unstable situation. We show that language-specific and universal factors interact in learning. (shrink)

There exist different kinds of averaging of the differences of the energy–momentum and angular momentum in normal coordinates NC(P) which give tensorial quantities. The obtained averaged quantities are equivalent mathematically because they differ only by constant scalar dimensional factors. One of these averaging was used in our papers [J. Garecki, Rep. Math. Phys. 33, 57 (1993); Int. J. Theor. Phys. 35, 2195 (1996); Rep. Math. Phys. 40, 485 (1997); J. Math. Phys. 40, 4035 (1999); Rep. Math. Phys. 43, 397 (1999); (...) Rep. Math. Phys. 44, 95 (1999); Ann. Phys. (Leipzig) 11, 441 (2002); M.P. Dabrowski and J. Garecki, Class. Quantum. Grar. 19, 1 (2002)] giving the canonical superenergy and angular supermomentum tensors. In this paper we present another averaging of the differences of the energy–momentum and angular momentum which gives tensorial quantities with proper dimensions of the energy–momentum and angular momentum densities. We have called these tensorial quantities “the averaged relative energy–momentum and angular momentum tensors”. These tensors are very closely related to the canonical superenergy and angular supermomentum tensors and they depend on some fundamental length L > 0. The averaged relative energy–momentum and angular momentum tensors of the gravitational field obtained in the paper can be applied, like the canonical superenergy and angular supermomentum tensors, to coordinate independent analysis (local and in special cases also global) of this field. Up to now we have applied the averaged relative energy–momentum tensors to analyze vacuum gravitational energy and momentum and to analyze energy and momentum of the Friedman (and also more general, only homogeneous) universes. The obtained results are interesting, e.g., the averaged relative energy density is positive definite for the all Friedman and other universes which have been considered in this paper. (shrink)

Within the framework of the Kershaw approach and of a hypothesis on spatial stochasticity, the relativistic equations of Lehr and Park, Guerra and Ruggiero, and Vigier for stochastic Nelson mechanics are obtained. In our model there is another set of equations of the hydrodynamical type for the drift velocityv i(x j,t) and stochastic velocityu i(x j,t) of a particle. Taking into account quadratic terms in l, the universal length, we obtain from these equations the Sivashinsky equations forv i(x j,t) (...) in the caseu i →0. In the limit l →0, these equations acquire the Newtonian form. (shrink)

This paper develops a normative evaluation of the minimum wage in the light of recent evidence and theory about its effects. It argues that the minimum wage should be evaluated using a consequentialist criterion that gives priority to the jobs and incomes of the worst off. This criterion would be accepted by many different types of consequentialism, especially given the two major views about what the minimum wage does. One is that the minimum wage harms the jobs and incomes of (...) the worst off and the other is that it does neither much harm nor much good. The paper then argues at length that there are no important considerations besides jobs and incomes relevant to the assessment of the minimum wage. It criticizes exploitation arguments for the minimum wage. It is not clear that the minimum wage would reduce exploitation and the paper doubts that, if it did, it would do so in a morally significant way. The paper then criticizes freedom arguments against the minimum wage by rejecting appeals to self-ownership and freedom of contract and by arguing that no freedom of significance is lost by the minimum wage that is not already taken account of in the main consequentialist criterion. The conclusion is that, at worst, the minimum wage is a mistake and, at best, something to be half-hearted about. Footnotes1 My thanks to Paul Brown and Jerry Cohen for their written and verbal help, Andrew Williams for long discussions of this paper, two anonymous referees and the editors, and audiences at the Universities of Auckland, Newcastle, and Reading. (shrink)

In this book, J. L. Mackie makes a careful study of several philosophical issues involved in his account of causation. Mackie follows Hume's distinction between causation as a concept and causation as it is ‘in the objects’ and attempts to provide an account of both aspects. Mackie examines the treatment of causation by philosophers such as Hume, Kant, Mill, Russell, Ducasse, Kneale, Hart and Honore, and von Wright. Mackie's own account involves an analysis of causal statements in terms of counterfactual (...) conditionals though these are judged to be incapable of giving a complete account of causation. Mackie argues that regularity theory too can only offer an incomplete picture of the nature of causation. In the course of his analysis, Mackie critically examines the account of causation offered by Kant, as well as the contemporary Kantian approaches offered by philosophers such as Bennett and Strawson. Also addressed are issues such as the direction of causation, the relation of statistical laws and functional laws, the role of causal statements in legal contexts, and the understanding of causes both as ‘facts’ and ‘events’. Throughout the discussion of these topics, Mackie develops his own complex account of the nature of causation, finally bringing his analysis to bear in regard to the topic of teleology and the question of whether final causes can be justifiably reduced to efficient causes. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:THOMAS AND THE UNIVERSE STANLEY L. JAKI Seton Ha,ll Uni1;ersity South Orange, New Jersey FEW SUBJECTS MAY appear so discouragingly vast as Thoma's and the Universe. Few have pmduced a work vaster, let alone deeper, than did Thomrus. As to the universe, its Viastness as well as its depth ·are succinctly stated in Newman's Idea of a University:" There is but one thought greater than that (...) of the universe, and that is the thought of its Maker." 1 There is in aiddition the vastness of the history of the notion of the universe and the.large number of Thomas' interpreters, not all of them immune to prolixity. At any rate, Thomas' best known ~0th-century interpreters offer, as will be seen shortly, at most a brief chapter or a subsection of it on Thomas and the universe with very little on the universe as such. A possible reason for this is that in rthe vast writings of Thomas there is no chapter or question on the universe as suoh. By as such I mean the very core of the notion of the universe, or its 'being the totality of consistently interacting things and their very unity. Thomas, as will 1be seen later, is not iat all silent on this point. Brut if one tries to focate his relevant dicta hy looking through the detailed fables of contents in, say, the Para:na edition of his works, one is not given much guidance. No different is the cruse when one looks through the subject indices. Entries under "universum" are almost as scarce as hen"s teeth. As to entries under " mundus," they.are of no great help on the worild or universe as such. Authors who let their publishers undertake the compilation of the subject index of their books will p11obably agree that the 1J. H. Newman, The Idea, of a, University (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1888), p. 462. 545 546 STANLEY L. J AKI result is very unsatisfactory in most cases. Few reaiders can really sense the nuances of an author's real concerns, especially if, like Thomas, he has many important concerns. There is in addition the effect of the climate of thought. Under ordinary circumstances one does not pay attention to the air one hreathes in, and much less writes about it extensively, though one still can make incisive though brief references to it. In the intellectual atmosphere surrounding Thomas, the reality o[ the universe :as such 'Was taken to he a most obvious fact. There were debates whether the universe was eternal or temporal; whether it was uncreated or created out of nothing or out of some prime matter; whether any creature could he given a creative power; whether the unive11se was governed providentially; whether it was properly ordered; whether anything occurred in it :by chance or thy accident; whether it was absolutely or relatively the best; whether it could have been otherwise; whether it was necessarily spherical; whether it could move or not-but nobody.felt the need to discuss ·at length whether there was a universe,.that is, a totality of consistently intemcting things 1aH of which verged toward unity. Democritus' claim aibout a large number of universes was, of course, known, but just a;s well known was the illogicality of it. Either those universes interructed with one,another, and in that oase they clearly formed one :single universe, or they were unknowaible to one another in the 'absence of such interaction. 'lihe arguments Aristotle offered 2 on behalf of the unicity of the universe were widely adhered to even in the latter half of the 17th century. The idea of the plurality of worlds that came then into vogue l1ested largely on taking planets and stars for worlds, though hardly ever with the intent of destroying the notion of the universe as a totality. The spontaneous acceptance of a real universe remained part and parcel of Western consciousness until Kant's Critique of Pure Reason began to make a real impact through the rise of Neo-Kantiani:sm fil'om the 1870s on. Reaction to that impact 2 Aristotle, On the Heavens, Bk I, ch. 8-9. THOMAS AND THE... (shrink)

The existence of a mathematical theory determining the shape of the Great Pyramid is a long‐standing assumption, and speculation on the subject dates back to Herodotus. Roger Herz‐Fischler's study presents and discusses eleven major theories and their proponents in the light of archaeological and philosophical considerations. The historiographical aspect of the study is very useful, as is the formulation and discussion of some of the problems. A brief sociological case study of the Pi‐theory and the reasons for its propagation and (...) popularity in Britain is particularly interesting. But although this book offers much that will be of interest to professional and amateur historians of mathematics and pyramid enthusiasts, it does not provide a definitive conclusion to the 2,500‐year‐old debate.Having dismissed all but three of the theories and unable to decide among them, Herz‐Fischler reaches the rather extraordinary conclusion that there may have been no true theoretical basis for the angles of inclination that might have been established “by eye” . In settling for this interpretation, however, he fails to consider how the angle would have been replicated on the different sides of a pyramid or how angles of inclination would have been maintained or transferred to other pyramids of different sizes: for example, Khufu's three queens' pyramids have slopes virtually identical to those of the main pyramid .The three theories among which Herz‐Fischler cannot decide are all proportion‐based theories, two relating to the angle of inclination and one to the angle of the arris . This conclusion is significant in its own right and relates to practical building considerations. Herz‐Fischler is keen to distinguish mathematically between integer proportional systems and the seked theory , a system attested in ancient Egyptian mathematical texts and related to the division of the cubit into seven palms, each of four fingers. But the close relation between these two methods of measurement in practical terms is clear, and either one could have been used with ease by an ancient builder.Herz‐Fischler states that “there simply is no archaeological evidence for the above three rise over run based theories” . Here he is too quick to dismiss the evidence presented by Flinders Petrie from a mastaba at Meidum . Outside the corners of the structure are walls with traces of horizontal lines at cubit intervals and sloping lines marking the inclination of the faces. Herz‐Fischler points to the lack of marks to indicate how the slope was constructed, but he fails to consider how an identical slope was constructed eight times around the structure if such a horizontal measurement was not used. Nor are the corners of the structure level; thus the correct measurements must be calculated relative to the depth. Mark Lehner, in his Complete Pyramids , page 220, offers evidence from Giza that the builders constructed the corners by measuring in a certain distance from reference points outside the sides. The pyramid drawing from Meroe based on a rectangular grid does not necessarily conflict with a rise and run theory and certainly shows that a proportional system was used relating side length to height. I find this archaeological evidence for the use of rise over run theories convincing, if limited, and it strongly supports side‐inclination based theories over those relating to the arris.The Meroe drawing cannot be taken as reliable evidence that the seked theory was not used in Fourth Dynasty structures , as it dates to over 2,000 years after the Great Pyramid was constructed and lies outside Egypt. As for the question of whether a seked‐based system or integers were used to construct the angle of the sides, Herz‐Fischler could have used the measured angles of sloping corridors and shafts inside the Great Pyramid that must have been constructed using similar techniques. Further, he makes no attempt to apply these theories to the slopes of other pyramids, although in some cases he does consider examples presented by other authors. Applying these theories more broadly might lead to more decisive results. Before readers undertake to do so themselves, however, they should be alerted that some of the measurements given in Appendix 2 are out of date. Corrected figures are: Abu Rawash, c. 52° ; Bent Pyramid, 55° 00′ 30″ , 43° 01′ 30″ ; Red Pyramid, 44° 44′ . In this last example considerable variation was noted in the inclination of different stretches of the same pyramid face, which suggests that an angle of 45° was intended. This observed variation is very significant considering how little of the casing of the next pyramid constructed—the Great Pyramid—is preserved .Although I find Herz‐Fischler's conclusions rather weak and some of his treatments of archaeological sources too dismissive, this volume provides a useful introduction to the subject and a clear formulation of the problems involved. It is, then, a thought‐provoking contribution to a long‐standing debate. (shrink)

This article deals with the reframing of the concept of universal mediated communication on a global scale. Subjects include the following: the universe has a conscious force field at all its scales, requiring continuous inter-scale communication of information; the field exhibits distinct electromagnetic frequencies associated with the building blocks of life; and advances in the technology of sound production with electronic synthesizers can be applied to study mechanisms of such universal communication. The question being addressed is how electronic synthesizers (...) can be used to create sonic xenolinguistic expressions when composing with sonified frequencies obtained from bio-organisms, human protein structures, phonemes and various types of interstellar frequencies that include, but are not limited to, gamma bursts, pulsars and neutron stars. The objective is to construct sonic xenolingusitic expressions that can act like feedback loops within the field of consciousness. These sonic expressions can include anomalous cognitive, emotive or spiritual experiences that may be emerging out of the universal field of consciousness in real time. Xenolinguistics is a hypothetical language used to communicate with other sentient beings in the universe. The rationale for composing sonic xenolingustic expressions is the belief that the universe is considered conscious and that there is a field of consciousness existing throughout the universe that in principle is also instrumental in how communication can evolve with extraterrestrials. Outlines of other attempts at extraterrestrial communication by other researchers will be offered based on current literature. The probability that other life forms have established some mode of information exchange that is detectable and that, in return, may be able to create a form of communication to respond will be covered. It is postulated that various energy fields existing before and after the creation of our universe interacted with one another becoming abiotic, and then over time, formed even more complex structures. It is these complex structures that were then able to communicate essential information for maintaining their stability and survivability by using specific signalling frequencies. It is hypothesized that first life in the universe emerged within an already existing field of information and that our consciousness is thereby able to establish communication with other forms of consciousness in the universe. It is on this basis that a novel scientific and philosophical paradigm is considered in which the universe is conceived of as an active information matrix that can entertain potential extraterrestrial communication. In this framework, the present article will offer a new approach to orchestrated electronic sounds as a means to such communication. By integrating quantum physical properties into that sonic framework, a new study emerged on how sonic xenolinguistic elements can be incorporated into electronic composition techniques. This new framework may produce new algorithms for musical expression that not only represent an innovative future of electronic music but may also be crucial in the formulation and induction of new states of consciousness that will enable humankind to directly participate in the further becoming of the universe as a result of the evolution of this universal field of consciousness. (shrink)

Zygon®, Volume 56, Issue 4, Page 1058-1069, December 2021.

This book focuses on a new world-view: the harmony existing between systems that are so strongly interdependent they behave as a single entity.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Women Philosophers of the Seventeenth Century, and: Anne Conway: A Woman PhilosopherJane DuranWomen Philosophers of the Seventeenth Century, by Jacqueline Broad; 204 pp. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. $65.00. Anne Conway: A Woman Philosopher, by Sarah Hutton; 280 pp. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. $75.00.Recent work on women philosophers has, in general, approached the topic from two vantage points: on the one hand, a number of anthologies have (...) been published, wherein commentators present a small portion of the woman thinker's work, often without the background necessary for a fuller understanding. On the other hand, some few women philosophers have been the subject of full-length works, but these have tended, by and large, to be women thinkers of the twentieth century, with whose work we are already familiar. Two recent books, one by Jacqueline Broad and the other by Sarah Hutton, go a long way toward improving the situation.Work by Eileen O'Neill, Sarah Hutton and Margaret Atherton, among others, has helped familiarize us with the notion that the seventeenth century—that era so commonly associated with Descartes and the rise of modern philosophy—was also a time of rich theorizing by women philosophers. Jacqueline Broad's book possesses many virtues: it has the finely-tuned style of the careful historian, while at the same time not failing to demonstrate acquaintance with a range of contemporary feminist commentary. Part of the problem in addressing women thinkers of the past is another version of what we are now tempted to call the essentialism problem: does it make sense to think that there is a style that might be demarcated as "feminine," or that might, in some way, pertain uniquely to women theorists? These are difficult issues, but a partial response to the question is to try to remember that it is not for no reason that women thinkers have, indeed, been left out of the canon. As Broad herself says, women philosophers "are now mere footnotes to the standard historical-intellectual accounts of the early modern period" (p. 1).Broad does a superb job of navigating between the need to set out the plain tenets of the thinker's philosophy, and the desire to try to tie it into these larger questions. In six chapters, she addresses the work of Elizabeth of Bohemia, [End Page 200] Margaret Cavendish, Anne Conway, Mary Astell, Damaris Masham and Catharine Trotter Cockburn The chapters on Elizabeth, Margaret Cavendish and Mary Astell are particularly strong—here part of the difficulty is that we do have familiar commentaries addressing the work of these women, and it is hard to try to see them in a new light. We are accustomed, for example, to think of Elizabeth merely as Descartes's correspondent. As is the case with information that is currently coming to bear on the question of Harriet Taylor Mill's input into the work of John Stuart Mill, it is difficult for us to see Elizabeth as a thinker in her own right, or, indeed, to give her the credit that Descartes himself gave her; as Broad notes, he had described her as "the only person I have so far found who has completely understood all my previous works" (p. 13). Margaret Cavendish's reputation has suffered from the somewhat scattered approach of her writings, and Broad cites her "reputation for eccentricity" (p. 38). Nevertheless, the sheer volume of her work and its allusion to the problems addressed by the Cambridge Platonists (areas also worked on by Anne Conway) demands that she be taken far more seriously than she has in the past. Astell has become known largely for her more overtly feminist works, such as A Serious Proposal to the Ladies, but she was also the author of several other pieces addressing issues in metaphysics, and again the amount of her work and its citation during her own time would militate against the notion that it should not receive thorough examination.Broad does a wonderful job of setting out the main philosophical questions found in these theorists' works, and she excels at pitting their views against those of the various male philosophers whose work—according to... (shrink)

I argue that Kant has developed a broad systematic account of the architectonic functionality of pure reason that can be used and advanced in contemporary contexts. Reason, in the narrow sense, is responsible for the picture of a well-ordered universe of science consisting of architectonic ideas of science, sciences and parts of sciences. In the first section (I), I show what Kant means by the architectonic ideas by explaining and interrelating the concepts of (a) the faculty of reason, (b) (...) ideas (as principles), (c) method, and (d) sciences of reason. Thereafter (II), I think through his holistic understanding of science and scientific progress and suggest differentiating between four levels of use of architectonic ideas, drawing on the metaphor of a well-structured universe as imagined by Kant in his work on the Universal Natural History and Theory of the Heavens. I also claim that each possible idea of reason can be (apart from its primary function) additionally regarded as a fourth-level architectonic concept when explicitly conceived as an object of (e. g. philosophical) studies, i. e. from a mere methodological perspective. In the final section (III), I unveil the potential of Kant’s theory by pointing out how this architectonic methodological function of pure reason is tacitly used in Karl-Otto Apel’s contemporary philosophical research programme. You can get the official version of the paper and the whole issue (open access) by clicking on the attached link. (shrink)

In this paper, I investigate type theories from several perspectives. First, I present and elaborate the philosophical and technical motivations for these theories. I then offer a formal analysis of various TTs, focusing on the cardinality of the set of types contained in each. I argue that these TTs can be divided into four formal categories, which are derived from the cardinality of the set of their basic elementary types and the finiteness of the lengths of their molecular types. The (...) paper provides proofs of the cardinality of the universe of types for each of the specified theories. (shrink)

Many philosophers have argued that the past must be finite in duration because otherwise reaching the present moment would have involved something impossible, namely, the sequential occurrence of an actual infinity of events. In reply, some philosophers have objected that there can be nothing amiss in such an occurrence, since actually infinite sequences are ‘traversed’ all the time in nature, for example, whenever an object moves from one location in space to another. This essay focuses on one of the two (...) available replies to this objection, namely, the claim that actual infinities are not traversed in nature because space, time, and other continuous wholes divide into parts only in so far as we divide them in thought, and thus divide into only a finite number of parts. I grant that this reply succeeds in blunting the anti-finitist objection, but I argue that it also subverts the very argument against an eternal past that it was intended to save. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Introduction to the Mystery of the Church by Benoît-Dominique de La Soujeole, O.P.David OlsonIntroduction to the Mystery of the Church. By Benoît-Dominique de La Soujeole, O.P. Trans. by Michael J. Miller. Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2014. Pp. xxviii + 640. $75.00 (cloth). ISBN: 978-0-8132-2607-1.La Soujeole intends his work to be a textbook in an introductory course in ecclesiology. While this is a review of (...) the English translation, the book was first published in French in 2007, and the preface to the original edition stated, “The present volume is a course in ecclesiology that has been taught regularly at the Dominican House of Studies in Toulouse” (xxv). As a textbook, it is well structured and should be accessible to a wide variety of students. The writing style in translation is clear and straightforward, with explanations given for any terms of art which are used, making it accessible to an audience with some theological training.The tone of the book is theological, that is to say, it is focused on an ordered view of the Catholic faith. It is not apologetic or polemical as is sometimes the case with books on ecclesiology, particularly those preceding the Second Vatican Council. On the other hand, it is certainly not a relativistic, blandly Christian study of various notions of church. Each of the topics within the book is situated within Scripture, and the author provides ample bibliography, though—not surprisingly, considering his religious order and background—the work leans heavily upon St. Thomas Aquinas. The book gives a very balanced view of the teachings of Vatican II.The author begins his work with a general introduction that provides a brief historical overview of important moments and trends in the theology of the Church, as well as a review of ecclesiology as a separate theological subject. One point is that the study of ecclesiology per se is relatively new, beginning only in the fourteenth century, but that questions concerning the ecclesia are found within all major areas of theological study. Ecclesiology cannot neatly be divorced from the study of the doctrine of God, Christology, or the sacraments. Issues regarding sacramental theology and Christology are prominent in the second portion of the book.Explanations are full and show a certain rigor. Some might consider them at times pedantic. For example, the distinction of belief in God from belief in the Church in the Nicene Creed is more than four pages in length, rehearsing difficulties of translation (296-301). More substantially on this point, over these four plus pages the author does not manage to make what would be to many theologians the obvious distinction between the absolute God and the created reality referred to as the Church. In fact, it is not clear that this is a distinction the author would want to make, as the second part of the book, containing his speculative theology, eschews a distinction between a visible and invisible church, the body of the Church and the grace of Jesus Christ. A [End Page 324] too-cursory reading of the second part could tend toward conflating the Church and the inner life of God.The book is divided into three parts. The first part is subdivided into thematic descriptions of the Church. The several themes explored are “Images of the Church and the Kingdom of God,” “the Church [as] the Body of Christ,” “the Church [as] the Temple of the Spirit,” and “the Church [as] the People of God.” The discussion on the Kingdom of God is the most limited. The first part of the book concludes with a section entitled “Recapitulation: The Church Is a Mystery.”The presentations on the Body of Christ, the Temple of the Spirit, and the People of God are done thoroughly. They follow a standard pattern of reviewing Scripture, patristic developments, the medieval period (mostly St. Thomas), and developments from Vatican II, which the author characterizes as the council on the Church. Following a thematic approach, particularly in teaching ecclesiology, seems most appropriate since the typical student may lack the needed... (shrink)

Using the artificial language paradigm, we studied the acquisition of morphophonemic alternations with exceptions by 160 German adult learners. We tested the acquisition of two types of alternations in two regularity conditions while additionally varying length of training. In the first alternation, a vowel harmony, backness of the stem vowel determines backness of the suffix. This process is grounded in substance, and this universal phonetic factor bolsters learning a generalization. In the second alternation, tenseness of the stem vowel determines (...) backness of the suffix vowel. This process is not based in substance, but it reflects a phonotactic property of German and our participants benefit from this language-specific factor. We found that learners use both cues, while substantive bias surfaces mainly in the most unstable situation. We show that language-specific and universal factors interact in learning. (shrink)

By forcing over a model of with a class-sized partial order preserving this theory we produce a model in which there is a locally defined well-order of the universe; that is, one whose restriction to all levels H is a well-order of H definable over the structure H, by a parameter-free formula. Further, this forcing construction preserves all supercompact cardinals as well as all instances of regular local supercompactness. It is also possible to define variants of this construction which, (...) in addition to forcing a locally defined well-order of the universe, preserve many of the n-huge cardinals from the ground model. (shrink)

Este artículo busca comprender las relaciones e intercambios entre filosofía y ciencia, analizando un caso concreto: el uso que hace Bergson del argumento de Boltzmann contra la reversibilidad o recurrencia del universo (“paradoja de Zermelo”), apoyando indi- rectamente su concepción de la irreversibilidad del universo asentada en un élan vital. Criticamos que Bergson, en su interpretación, convierta en “imposibilidad absoluta” lo que Boltzmann asienta sólo como “imposibilidad práctica”. Mostraremos que el filósofo francés distorsiona el argumento, dejando de lado dos puntos (...) fundamentales: a) la particular posición epistemológica de Boltzmann respecto a las teorías científicas y su relación con la experiencia, b) el atomismo que sirve de base al argumento de Boltzmann, atomismo que Bergson rechaza. Concluiremos que el argumento de Boltzmann no es válido en el marco metafísico (epistemológico y ontológico) de Bergson. Esto contribuirá a una mejor comprensión de los problemas que surgen en los intercambios conceptuales entre ciencia y filosofía. (shrink)

Are the laws of nature real? Do they belong to the world or merely reflect the way we speak about it? If they are real, what sort of entity are they? This study contributes to the ongoing discussion of these questions by emphasizing the importance of a cosmological perspective on them. I argue that the evidence coming from modern evolutionary cosmology presents difficulties for certain currently fashionable philosophical accounts of laws, in particular, for the Dretske-Tooley-Armstrong theory. I defend, in light (...) of this evidence, the idea of laws as grounded in irreducible nomic properties of basic objects and examine its cosmological implications and consequences for the philosophy of modality. ;If the laws of nature are real, they must represent an integral aspect of the universe as a whole. From a cosmological point of view, these two totalities, the laws of nature and the universe, may be related. I begin by showing that a concern about the consequences of such possible relationship was an important factor in the historical rivalry between the steady-state and big bang cosmologies . ;The cosmological perspective on laws has still more striking implications in the context of the contemporary interplay between big-bang cosmology and high energy physics in the effort to understand the processes at work during the first moments of cosmic evolution. In a sense, the evolution of the physical state of the universe as a whole may have "carried" with it the evolution of certain nomic properties of matter. I contend that this poses problems for some nomic ontologies, such as the relations-between-universals theory, and favors the view of laws as grounded in causal powers of particulars. I show how the universe of causally powerful basic substances provides a natural framework for an interesting sense of modality characteristic of laws and how this illuminates the notoriously difficult problems of essential properties and natural kinds. (shrink)

The author describes the Cartesian way of solving the problem of the universal method in mathematics, in particular, the problem of applying algebra in geometry when it comes to the convergence of a discrete number and a continuous quantity. The article shows that the solution to this problem proposed by F. Viète is imperfect, since it introduces vague pseudo-geometric objects, and the geometric quantity is still far from an algebraic number. The author proves that Descartes' solution to this problem through (...) the use of Eudoxus proportions is based on such Cartesian epistemological principles as: the requirement of clarity and expressiveness of thinking; the idea of the central role of a holistic mathematical science; the idea of the existence of a simple and obvious nature of length as a basis for comparing all extended things; the elevation of the concept of ratio to the rank of a single subject of mathematical disciplines. (shrink)

Presents a look at the work of Pythagoras, a philosopher who lived in sixth century Greece, and the influence of his theories of mathmatics and music on subsequent intellectual traditions in both the East and West.

The arc of the moral universe -- Structure, choice, and legitimacy: Locke's theory of the state -- Democratic equality -- A more democratic liberalism -- For a democratic society -- Knowledge, morality and hope: the social thought of Noam Chomsky: with Joel Rogers -- Reflections on Habermas on democracy -- A matter of demolition?: Susan Okin on justice and gender -- Minimalism about human rights: the most we can hope for? -- Is there a human right to democracy? -- (...) Extra republicam nulla justitia?: with Charles Sabel. (shrink)