In 1985, Swiss legal philosopher Walter Ott visited Herbert Hart in Oxford and made this record of their meeting, which casts novel light on some of Hart’s ideas. Ott engaged Hart in a fresh encounter with the legal philosophy of Gustav Radbruch, particularly Hart’s and Radbruch’s reasons for a minimum content of justice in law. They also discussed the grudge informer, state responsibility under laws of an earlier régime, and questions of the definition and falsifiability of legal theories. Hart surprisingly (...) reported Hans Kelsen as stating, when they had met at Berkeley in 1961, that Hume (and not Kant, and certainly not Wittgenstein) was the greatest philosopher who had ever lived. The translation is accompanied with annotations explaining references, assumptions and contexts. (shrink)

Raymond Aron is widely regarded as the most important figure in the history of twentieth-century French liberalism. Yet his status within the history of liberal thought has been more often proclaimed than explained. Though he is frequently lauded as the inheritor of France's liberal tradition, Aron's formative influences were mostly non-French and often radically anti-liberal thinkers. This book explains how, why, and with what consequences he belatedly defined and aligned himself with a French liberal tradition. It also situates Aron within (...) the larger histories of Cold War liberalism and decolonization, re-evaluating his contribution to debates over totalitarianism, the end of ideology, and the Algerian War. By exposing the enduring importance of Aron's student political engagements for the development of his thought, Iain Stewart challenges the prevailing view of Aron's early intellectual trajectory as a journey from naïve socialist idealism to mature liberal realism, offering a new critical perspective on one of the twentieth century's most influential intellectuals. (shrink)

Liberalism in Dark Times is an important and original contribution to the new wave of historical scholarship on liberalism that emerged around the turn of the century and has gained considerable mo...

Summary This article approaches post-war debates about the relationship between normative political theory and empirical political science from a French perspective. It does so by examining Raymond Aron's commentaries on a series of articles commissioned by him for a special issue of the Revue française de science politique on this theme as well as through an analysis of his wartime dialogue with the neo-Thomist philosopher, Jacques Maritain. Following a consideration of Aron's critique of contemporary approaches to this issue in France, (...) we discuss his own distinctive attempt to draw normative theory and empirical science into the same orbit by tracing the interaction of these two elements in his work from the late 1930s to the mid-1960s. (shrink)

Taking as its starting point recent claims that Jean-Paul Sartre's Critique de la Raison Dialectique was written as an attempt to overcome the historical relativism of Raymond Aron's Introduction à la philosophie de l'histoire , the present article traces this covert dialogue back to a fundamental disagreement between the two men over the interpretation of Wilhelm Dilthey's anti-positivist theory of Verstehen or 'understanding'. In so doing it counters a longstanding tendency to emphasise the convergence of Aron and Sartre's philosophical interests (...) prior to the break in their friendship occasioned by the onset of the Cold War, suggesting that the causes of their later, radical political divergence were pregnant within this earlier philosophical divergence. (shrink)

We introduce a new logical operator CSTC and show that incorporating this operator into first-order logic enables as to capture the complexity class PSPACE. We also show that by varying how the operator is applied we can capture the complexity classes P, NP, the classes of the Polynomial Hierarchy PH, and PSPACE. As such, the operator CSTC can be regarded as a general purpose operator. We also give applications of these characterizations by showing that P and NP coincide with those (...) problems accepted by two new classes of program schemes , by producing some new complete problems for various complexity classes where the reductions are from first principles and do not use known complete problems , and by giving a simple proof that first-order logic incorporated with the least fixed point operator captures P. (shrink)

Jörgen Jörgensen (1938) asks why there should not be a valid deduction even though the premises are imperatives (“Jörgensen’s Dilemma”). Robert Walter (1996; 9 Ratio Juris 168), following Hans Kelsen, thinks that there can be a valid deduction if the premises, although in prescriptive (including imperative) language, are actually descriptions of prescriptions. It is suggested that Walter then has his own dilemma: the more possible it is, for such descriptions to be valid, the less likely it is, that the prescriptions (...) described are illogical; Walter’s Dilemma is a species of Jörgensen’s. (shrink)

Hans Kelsen’s Pure Theory of Law, presented as a form of legal positivism, is interpreted as establishing metaphysical bases of legal science, on analogy with Kant’s “metaphysical bases of natural science (Metaphysische Anfangsgründe der Naturwissenschaft)”. It is asked, in the light of the Pure Theory’s acknowledged difficulties, how far it succeeds in escaping from the exegetical tradition in Western legal theory.

We investigate why similar extensions of first-order logic using operators corresponding to NP-complete decision problems apparently differ in expressibility: the logics capture either NP or LNP. It had been conjectured that the complexity class captured is NP if and only if the operator is monotone. We show that this conjecture is false. However, we provide evidence supporting a revised conjecture involving finite variations of monotone problems.

We investigate the definability in monadic ∑11 and monadic Π11 of the problems REGk, of whether there is a regular subgraph of degree k in some given graph, and XREGk, of whether, for a given rooted graph, there is a regular subgraph of degree k in which the root has degree k, and their restrictions to graphs in which every vertex has degree at most k, namely REGkk and XREGkk, respectively, for k ≥ 2 . Our motivation partly stems from (...) the fact that REGkk and XREGkk are logspace equivalent to CONN and REACH, respectively, for k ≥ 3, where CONN is the problem of whether a given graph is connected and REACH is the problem of whether a given graph has a path joining two given vertices. We use monadic first - order reductions, monadic ∑11 games and a recent technique due to Fagin, Stockmeyer and Vardi to almost completely classify whether these problems are definable in monadic ∑11 and monadic Π11, and we compare the definability of these problems. (shrink)

Ethical decision-making frameworks assist in identifying the issues at stake in a particular setting and thinking through, in a methodical manner, the ethical issues that require consideration as well as the values that need to be considered and promoted. Decisions made about the use, sharing, and re-use of big data are complex and laden with values. This paper sets out an Ethics Framework for Big Data in Health and Research developed by a working group convened by the Science, Health and (...) Policy-relevant Ethics in Singapore Initiative. It presents the aim and rationale for this framework supported by the underlying ethical concerns that relate to all health and research contexts. It also describes a set of substantive and procedural values that can be weighed up in addressing these concerns, and a step-by-step process for identifying, considering, and resolving the ethical issues arising from big data uses in health and research. This Framework is subsequently applied in the papers published in this Special Issue. These papers each address one of six domains where big data is currently employed: openness in big data and data repositories, precision medicine and big data, real-world data to generate evidence about healthcare interventions, AI-assisted decision-making in healthcare, public-private partnerships in healthcare and research, and cross-sectoral big data. (shrink)

Raymond Aron is best known for his intellectual sparring with Jean-Paul Sartre and for his stature as the pre-eminent Cold War liberal in France. He is credited with establishing an aut...

Moving beyond both realist and anti-realist accounts of mathematics, Shapiro articulates a "structuralist" approach, arguing that the subject matter of a mathematical theory is not a fixed domain of numbers that exist independent of each other, but rather is the natural structure, the pattern common to any system of objects that has an initial object and successor relation satisfying the induction principle.

In what follows I offer some reflections on an ethics of listening, or perhaps more generally a philosophy of listening, that can be discerned in different forms in the experimental music that, since the 1950s, has challenged and radicalised how music is understood. I situate these reflections around three of my own concert experiences as an audience member.

What kind of technology is the piano? It was once a distinctly everyday technology. In the bourgeois home of the nineteenth century it became an emblematic figure of gendered social life, its role shifting between visually pleasing piece of furniture, source of light entertainment, and expression of cultured upbringing. It performed this role unobtrusively, acting as a transparent mediator of social relations. To the composer of concert music it was, and sometimes still is, says Samuel Wilson, like the philosopher’s table: (...) “an assumed background on which one writes.” Like other instruments standard to Western art music, the piano was designed to facilitate the production of a consistent and refined timbre. More than most other such instruments, the piano also facilitated a kind of sonic neutrality. With its wide pitch range and smoothing of the percussive attack of its predecessor instruments, the piano presented composers with a technological means of approaching composition from a seemingly objective vantage point. It exemplified, in Heideggerian terms, the instrumentality of the instrument, serving as a mediator between idea and expression that apparently adds no character of its own. -/- This notion of the invisibility, or transparency, of the mediations that musical technologies such as the piano enact is one of my areas of concern here. So too is its inverse: when these mediations become visible or opaque. Transparency has been a topic of significant recent theoretical attention. Stefanos Geroulanos, for example, has detailed how the supposed transparency of intersubjective, epistemological, and social relations was a major point of critique in postwar French thought, where the supposition of transparency was taken to suppress how the world was “complex, layered, structured, filled with heterogeneity” – and, as I will stress here, contingency. The thinkers Geroulanos considers, from Jean-Paul Sartre through to Jean-François Lyotard, can be said to be united in their refusal to invisibilise mediatedness. From a starting point of conceiving of the piano as a technological artifact, and in particular from John Cage’s ‘prepared piano,’ I will explore how a similar concern has appeared in musical contexts, albeit not without the risk of reversion back into a logic of transparency. (shrink)

Adorno's remarks on the philosophy of history are scattered throughout his works. Perhaps the most important passages are to be found in Negative Dialectics and the 1964–1965 lectures on History and Freedom, as well as in texts such as Dialectic of Enlightenment and the essays on “The Idea of Natural‐History,” “Progress,” and “The Meaning of Working through the Past.” However, these works do not constitute anything like a complete theory. Nevertheless, many themes and references recur in Adorno's writings, allowing for (...) a selectively thematic reconstruction of the most central lines of argument. The present text brings together a few concepts and problems from Adorno's readings of Kant, Hegel, and Marx, mainly, in order to provide the reader with a general picture of what is at issue. (shrink)

It describes and explains the patient-centered model examining and evaluating qualitative and quantitative research. It comprehensively covers the evolution and the six interactive components of the patient-centered clinical method, taking the reader through the relationships between the patient and doctor and the patient and clinician. All the editors are professors in the Department of Family Medicine at the University of Western Ontario, London, Canada.

Iain Atack identifies the contribution of nonviolence to political theory through connecting central characteristics of nonviolent action to fundamental debates about the role of power and violence in politics. This in turn provides a platform for going beyond historical and strategic accounts of nonviolence to a deeper understanding of its transformative potential. From Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King to toppled communist regimes in Eastern Europe and pro-democracy movements in Serbia, Georgia and Ukraine, nonviolent action has played a significant (...) role in achieving social and political change in the last century. The Arab Spring revolutions, particularly those in Tunisia and Egypt, and the Occupy movement in the US and UK demonstrate that nonviolence continues to be a vital feature of many campaigns for democracy, human rights and social justice. (shrink)

Fischer suggests that the endless life of an immortal would be just as desirable as the very long but finite life of a long‐lived mortal. Fischer acknowledges that this is “one of the most difficult and challenging issues surrounding immortality.” This chapter answers the following: Why do we think, conversely, that being able to die makes a crucial difference? Why would an individual existence that could never come to an end necessarily be bad?. An immortal being could conceivably cycle through (...) an endless succession of such selves, each organized into a coherent and meaningful identity by the new life‐project born out of the collapse of the old one. The author argues, however, that the endless life of an immortal would necessarily fail to qualify as life worth living. So, were we ever to face that choice with which we began, we think living with death remains preferable to the alternative. (shrink)

Two important debates have characterized mainstream epistemology in recent years. The first is the debate between foundationalists and anti-foundationalists. The second is the debate over the details of a naturalized epistemology. Both debates have meant that traditional concepts of rationality and justification are now understood in a new light. Both debates have helped focus attention on the future direction of epistemology, its goals and its limitations.

There are, broadly speaking, two ways to think about rationality, as defined in the following passage: ‘Reason’ for a long time meant the activity of understanding and assimilating the eternal ideas which were to function as goals for men. Today, on the contrary, it is not only the business but the essential work of reason to find means for the goals one adopts at any given time. To use what Horkheimer called objective reason, and what others have called expressive or (...) non–instrumental reason, is to reflect on one's goals, to attempt to determine what preferences one ought to hold. On the other hand, to use what Horkheimer called subjective reason is to ‘be concerned with means and ends, with the adequacy of procedures for purposes more or less taken for granted’, that is, to be instrumentally rational. This contrast between non-instrumental and instrumental reason is at the heart of many contemporary social and philosophical disputes. 1. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Michael Rescorla has argued that it makes sense to compute directly with numbers, and he faulted Turing for not giving an analysis of number-theoretic computability. However, in line with a later paper of his, it only makes sense to compute directly with syntactic entities, such as strings on a given alphabet. Computing with numbers goes via notation. This raises broader issues involving de re propositional attitudes towards numbers and other non-syntactic abstract entities.

Thomas Hobbes often includes powers and abilities in his descriptions of the world. Meanwhile, Hobbes’s philosophical picture of the world appears quite reductive, and he seems sometimes to say that nothing exists but bodies in motion. In more extreme versions of such a picture, there would be no room for powers. Hobbes is not an eliminativist about powers, but his view does tend toward ontological minimalism. It would be good to have an account of what Hobbes thinks powers are, and (...) how they fit into his understanding of the world. In this chapter, I investigate Hobbes’s account of the metaphysics of powers and abilities. Section 1 considers three important aspects of Hobbes’s account of powers: the connection between powers and causes; the modal aspects of powers; and the connection between powers and motions. Sections 2 and 3 then consider interpretive arguments about whether Hobbes identifies powers with underlying corporeal features. (shrink)

In the Politics of Black Joy, Lindsey Stewart develops Hurston's contributions to political theory and philosophy of race by introducing the politics of joy as a refusal of neoabolitionism, a political tradition that reduces southern Black life to tragedy or social death.

Guthrie contends that religion can best be understood as systematic anthropomorphism - the attribution of human characteristics to nonhuman things and events. Religion, he says, consists of seeing the world as human like. He offers a fascinating array of examples to show how this strategy pervades secular life and how it characterizes religious experience.

In Kant and the Role of Pleasure in Moral Action, Iain Morrisson offers a new view on Kant’s theory of moral action.

Typically, a logic consists of a formal or informal language together with a deductive system and/or a model-theoretic semantics. The language is, or corresponds to, a part of a natural language like English or Greek. The deductive system is to capture, codify, or simply record which inferences are correct for the given language, and the semantics is to capture, codify, or record the meanings, or truth-conditions, or possible truth conditions, for at least part of the language.

Preface to paperback edition -- Why Schelling? why naturephilosophy? -- The powers due to becoming: the reemergence of platonic physics in the genetic philosophy -- Antiphysics and neo-Fichteanism -- The natural history of the unthinged -- "What thinks in me is what is outside me". phenomenality, physics and the idea -- Dynamic philosophy, transcendental physics -- Conclusion: transcendental geology.

Nuclear bodies contribute to non‐random organization of the human genome and nuclear function. Using a major prototypical nuclear body, the Cajal body, as an example, we suggest that these structures assemble at specific gene loci located across the genome as a result of high transcriptional activity. Subsequently, target genes are physically clustered in close proximity in Cajal body‐containing cells. However, Cajal bodies are observed in only a limited number of human cell types, including neuronal and cancer cells. Ultimately, Cajal body (...) depletion perturbs splicing kinetics by reducing target small nuclear RNA (snRNA) transcription and limiting the levels of spliceosomal snRNPs, including their modification and turnover following each round of RNA splicing. As such, Cajal bodies are capable of shaping the chromatin interaction landscape and the transcriptome by influencing spliceosome kinetics. Future studies should concentrate on characterizing the direct influence of Cajal bodies upon snRNA gene transcriptional dynamics.Also see the video abstract here. (shrink)

Following on the explorations of culture and politics in his previous collection The Good European, the writings in Zest delve into less obvious but important aspects of social life-- into manual work and 'dolce far niente', into ancient vernacular craft traditions and the data stockpiles of modernity. Early in the book we visit the Garden of Eden with Hieronymus Bosch, where we share with him the first fruit. It takes us by way of writers, artists, philosophers, travellers, photographers, musicians and (...) flavours into the world of Zest-- how we can find it and what its discovery does to us. Bamforth's sensuous, richly nuanced essays affect us as stories do, each one creating a world in which its arguments live and breathe, laugh and explore. His diverse interests, from Bible studies to communication theory, from photography to the impact of globalisation, and his shifts from botanising in the Garden of Eden to 'botanising on the asphalt' (Walter Benjamin) always keep in sight the philosophical issue that provides Zest's subtitle-- 'the art of living'. (shrink)

Heidegger is now widely recognized as one of the most influential and controversial philosophers of the twentieth century, yet much of his later philosophy remains shrouded in confusion and controversy. Restoring Heidegger's understanding of metaphysics as 'ontotheology' to its rightful place at the center of his later thought, this book demonstrates the depth and significance of his controversial critique of technology, his appalling misadventure with Nazism, his prescient critique of the university, and his important philosophical suggestions for the future of (...) higher education. It will be required reading for those seeking to understand the relationship between Heidegger's philosophy and National Socialism, as well as the continuing relevance of his work. (shrink)

Language was central to Hobbes's understanding of human beings and their mental abilities, and criticism of other philosophers' uses of language became a favorite critical tool for him. This paper connects Hobbes's theories about language to his criticisms of others' language, examining Hobbes's theories of propositions and truth, and how they relate to his claims that various sorts of proposition are absurd. It considers whether Hobbes in fact means anything more by 'absurd' than 'false'. And it pays particular attention to (...) Hobbes's categorization of causes of absurdity and of types of incoherent proposition, arguing that Hobbes's approach is only loosely related to later discussions of category mistakes. (shrink)

Søren Kierkegaard: Subjectivity, Irony, and the Crisis of Modernity examines the thought of Søren Kierkegaard, a unique figure, who has inspired, provoked, fascinated, and irritated people ever since he walked the streets of Copenhagen. At the end of his life, Kierkegaard said that the only model he had for his work was the Greek philosopher Socrates. This work takes this statement as its point of departure. Jon Stewart explores what Kierkegaard meant by this and to show how different aspects (...) of his writing and argumentative strategy can be traced back to Socrates. The main focus is The Concept of Irony, which is a key text at the beginning of Kierkegaard's literary career. Although it was an early work, it nevertheless played a determining role in his later development and writings. Indeed, it can be said that it laid the groundwork for much of what would appear in his later famous books such as Either/Or and Fear and Trembling. (shrink)

The cuticle of the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans forms the barrier between the animal and its environment. In addition to being a protective layer, it is an exoskeleton which is important in maintaining and defining the normal shape of the nematode. The cuticle is an extracellular matrix consisting predominantly of small collagen‐like proteins that are extensively crosslinked. Although it also contains other protein and non‐protein compounds that undoubtedly play a significant part in its function, the specific role of collagen in cuticle (...) structure and morphology is considered here. The C. elegans genome contains between 50 and 150 collagen genes, most of which are believed to encode cuticular collagens. Mutations that result in cuticular defects and grossly altered body form have been identified in more than 40 genes. Six of these genes are now known to encode cuticular collagens, a finding that confirms the importance of this group of structural proteins to the formation of the cuticle and the role of the cuticle as an exoskeleton in shaping the worm. It is likely that many more of the genes identified by mutations giving altered body form, will be collagen genes. Mutations in the cuticular collagen genes provide a powerful tool for investigating the mechanisms by which this group of proteins interact to form the nematode cuticle. (shrink)

The problem -- The proof -- The principle -- The programme -- Practical advice -- The prognosis.