A reply to Stuart Brown on how to understand the concept of learning.

This commentary challenges the conclusions reached by Franklin Miller and Robert Truog in their criticism of the President's Council's White Paper, "Controversies in the Determination of Death." I agree with much of Miller and Truog's criticism of the rationale offered by the President's Council for accepting neurological criteria for determining death but argue that they too quickly dismiss the alternative rationale of determining death by neurological criteria-i.e., the destruction of the psychophysical integrity of the human being that occurs when (...) the potential for consciousness and every other mental function is lost due to catastrophic injury to the brain. By focusing on the death of bodies instead of human beings, their view absurdly implies that decapitation would not necessarily result in one's death. Since total brain failure is a form of physiological decapitation, the neurological criterion coheres perfectly well with the ordinary understanding of decapitation as death. (shrink)

In the history of ideas, few associations of author and subject are as strong as David Hume’s association with induction. It is he, we say, who discovered or at least formally articulated the great philosophical “problem of induction”—that it is impossible to draw an exceptionless universal claim from particular ones, no matter how many there are. No matter how many white swans we see, we cannot be sure the next swan will be white. But that statement of the (...) problem is itself a universal claim, as are many others we go on making. We seem trapped in what C. D. Broad called “the scandal of philosophy.” But Hume himself would be surprised to find himself associated with this problem. He seldom used the word “induction,” but from those few instances and things he wrote elsewhere we can be sure he considered himself induction’s advocate and not its critic. Others thought of him that way for about a hundred and fifty years. This essay traces how Hume went from being considered a champion of induction to being considered its definitive skeptic. (shrink)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1752 edition. Excerpt:... to which the original Exclusion had been owing, the Points of two short and slender Hairs appear'd protruding themselves from its oval Surface. The thicker butoblong Bodies, from whose Extremities these grew, next forc'd themselves out, and it was evident to a-'n accustom'd Eye, that they were (...) the Antennze of a two wing'd Fly; next presented themselves the anterior Surfaces of two chequeffd Orbs, which were plainly the complex Eyes of anlnsect' of the same Species, separated by a plain Portion of a Forehead; and soon after the whole Head. This was no sooner all in View, than it swell'd to a Diameter equal to twice the Measure of that of the Breast. lt might have appear'd from the first, that the Head was growing under the Eye of the Observer, from the Extremity of the Thorax, but tho' a more rational Enquiry could not but produce for its Answer, that it was only now thrust forth out of the Cavity of the Breast in which it had before been lodg'd; it yet appear'd singular after this sudden Change in Size to conceive how a Thing should have been till that Moment lodg'd in a Cavityz not equal to half its own Diameter. P a The The Head was now entire and in its Place, and the Legs were firm, and supported the Body well, but the Wings did not yet appear. On examining the Place where they were to be expacted, I discover'd two irregular Protuberances of a wrinkled Surface, and considerably large, and under them the two oblong Pedicies which we see supporting the Balls under the Wings of all the two wing'd Flies. It was evident from this, that the Protuberances at the two Sides of the Base of the Thorax were the very Wings in their folded State, and this was soon prov'd by their expanding. The Wings in all this Race of Creatures are the last Part... (shrink)

This paper examines the controversy surrounding anthropologist Carleton S. Coon's 1962 book, "The Origin of Races." Coon maintained that the human sspecies was divided into five races before it had evolved into Homo sapiens and that the races evolved into sapiens at different times. Coon's thesis was used by segregationists in the United States as proof that African Americans were "junior" to white Americans and hence unfit for full participation in American society. The paper examines the interactions among Coon, (...) segregationist Carleton Putnam, geneticist Theodosius Dobzhansky, and anthropologist Sherwood Washburn. The paper concludes that Coon actively aided the segregationist cause in violation of his own standards for scientific objectivity. (shrink)

Part I Philosophic Traditions Introduction to Part I 3 1 Philosophy and the Afro-American Experience 7 CORNEL WEST 2 African-American Existential Philosophy 33 LEWIS R. GORDON 3 African-American Philosophy: A Caribbean Perspective 48 PAGET HENRY 4 Modernisms in Black 67 FRANK M. KIRKLAND 5 The Crisis of the Black Intellectual 87 HORTENSE J. SPILLERS Part II The Moral and Political Legacy of Slavery Introduction to Part II 107 6 Kant and Knowledge of Disappearing Expression 110 RONALD A. T. JUDY 7 (...) Social Contract Theory, Slavery, and the Antebellum Courts 125 ANITA L. ALLEN AND THADDEUS POPE 8 The Morality of Reparations II 134 BERNARD R. BOXILL Part III Africa and Diaspora Thought Introduction to Part III 151 9 “Afrocentricity‘: Critical Considerations 155 LUCIUS T. OUTLAW, JR. 10 African Retentions 168 TOMMY L. LOTT 11 African Philosophy at the Turn of the Century 190 ALBERT G. MOSLEY Part IV Gender, Race, and Racism Introduction to Part IV 199 12 Some Group Matters: Intersectionality, Situated Standpoints, and Black Feminist Thought 205 PATRICIA HILL COLLINS 13 Radicalizing Feminisms from “The Movement Era‘ 230 JOY A. JAMES 14 Philosophy and Racial Paradigms 239 NAOMI ZACK 15 Racial Classification and Public Policy 255 DAVID THEO GOLDBERG 16 White Supremacy 269 CHARLES W. MILLS Part V Legal and Social Philosophy Introduction to Part V 285 17 Self-Respect, Fairness, and Living Morally 293 LAURENCE M. THOMAS 18 The Legacy of Plessy v. Ferguson 306 MICHELE MOODY-ADAMS 19 Some Reflections on the Brown Decision and Its Aftermath 313 HOWARD McGARY 20 Contesting the Ambivalence and Hostility to Affirmative Action within the Black Community 324 LUKE C. HARRIS 21 Subsistence Welfare Benefits as Property Interests: Legal Theories and Moral Considerations 333 RUDOLPH V. VANTERPOOL 22 Racism and Health Care: A Medical Ethics Issue 349 ANNETTE DULA 23 Racialized Punishment and Prison Abolition 360 ANGELA Y. DAVIS Part VI Aesthetic and Cultural Values Introduction to Part VI 373 24 The Harlem Renaissance and Philosophy 381 LEONARD HARRIS 25 Critical Theory, Aesthetics, and Black Modernity 386 LORENZO C. SIMPSON 26 Black Cinema and Aesthetics 399 CLYDE R. TAYLOR 27 Thanatic Pornography, Interracial Rape, and the Ku Klux Klan 407 T. DENEAN SHARPLEY-WHITING 28 Lynching and Burning Rituals in African-American Literature 413 TRUDIER HARRIS-LOPEZ 29 Rap as Art and Philosophy 419 RICHARD SHUSTERMAN 30 Microphone Commandos: Rap Music and Political Ideology 429 BILL E. LAWSON 31 Sports, Political Philosophy, and the African American 436 GERALD EARLY. (shrink)

We propose a multi-step evaluation schema designed to help procurement agencies and others to examine the ethical dimensions of autonomous systems to be applied in the security sector, including autonomous weapons systems.

This book provides practical and research-based chapters that offer greater clarity about the particular kinds of teacher reflection that matter and avoids talking about teacher reflection generically, which implies that all kinds of reflection are of equal value.

This looks at three educational developments influenced by the idealism of T H Green and others. One was progressive education - under Holmes and Nunn, another the pursuit of understanding for its own sake, and the third education for a participatory democracy. John Dewey had a role in both the last two.

In 1990, the comptroller of the Catholic Diocese of Buffalo was charged with the embezzlement of eight million dollars of money belonging to the Diocese, He was subsequently convicted and served several years in state prison. Using this case as a starting point, this paper looks at several examples of white-collar crime and religious institutions. Should justice or mercy be the operative virtue in dealing with such criminals?

While we are commonly told that the distinctive method of mathematics is rigorous proof, and that the special topic of mathematics is abstract structure, there has been no agreement among mathematicians, logicians, or philosophers as to just what either of these assertions means. John P. Burgess clarifies the nature of mathematical rigor and of mathematical structure, and above all of the relation between the two, taking into account some of the latest developments in mathematics, including the rise of experimental (...) mathematics on the one hand and computerized formal proofs on the other hand. Along the way, a great many historical developments in mathematics, philosophy, and logic are surveyed. Yet very little in the way of background knowledge on the part of the reader is presupposed. (shrink)

By utilizing new information from both clinical and experimental (lesion, electrophysiological, and gene-activation) studies with animals, the anatomy underlying anterograde amnesia has been reformulated. The distinction between temporal lobe and diencephalic amnesia is of limited value in that a common feature of anterograde amnesia is damage to part of an comprising the hippocampus, the fornix, the mamillary bodies, and the anterior thalamic nuclei. This view, which can be traced back to Delay and Brion (1969), differs from other recent models in (...) placing critical importance on the efferents from the hippocampus via the fornix to the diencephalon. These are necessary for the encoding and, hence, the effective subsequent recall of episodic memory. An additional feature of this hippocampalanterior thalamic and the perirhinal–medial dorsal thalamic systems are compromised, leading to severe deficits in both recall and recognition. (shrink)

On the basis of arguments put forth by (Kripke, 1977a) and (Kripke, 1980), it is widely held that one can sometimes rationally accept propositions of the form "P and not-P" and also that there are necessary a posteriori truths. We will find that Kripke's arguments for these views appear probative only so long as one fails to distinguish between semantics and presemantics—between the literal meanings of sentences, on the one hand, and the information on the basis of which one identifies (...) those literal meanings, on the other. This same failure, it will be argued, underlies the popular thesis that intersubstituting co-referring terms sometimes turns true sentences into false ones and vice versa. Though seemingly plausible, this thesis has a number of counterintuitive consequences, among them that the occurrence of “snow” in “it is true that snow is white” doesn’t refer to snow. An understanding of the distinction between semantics and presemantics suggests a way to develop a semantic system that doesn’t have these consequences and that, moreover, reconciles our intuitions concerning cognitive content with some powerfully argued theses of contemporary philosophy of language. Some of this paper's main contentions are anticipated by Andrzej Boguslawski in his 1994 paper “Sentential Complementation and Truth.”. (shrink)

But Williams had created a field of historical study, where his white counterparts had not. Single-handedly and without the blessing or approval of the academic community, Williams had called attention to the importance of including Afro-Americans in any acceptable and comprehensive history of the nation long before the historians of various groups of European-Americans or Asian-Americans had begun to advocate a similar treatment for their groups. And if Williams did not impress the white professional historians, he gave heart (...) and encouragement to future Afro-American historians. When the History of the Negro Troops appeared in 1887, nineteen-year-old W. E. B. Du Bois was a college senior at Fisk University and editor-in-chief of the student magazine, The Fisk Herald. In the columns of the Herald Du Bois wrote, "At last we have a historian; not merely a Negro historian, but a man who judged by his merits alone has written a splendid narrative. The Herald congratulates George W. Williams, and the race, which may justly be . . . [proud] of him."1 Many years later, Carter G. Woodson, the founder of the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History and of the Journal of Negro History, described Williams' History of the Negro Troops as "one of the most valuable accounts of the Civil War."2 With words like these from Du Bois and Woodson, on whose shoulders much of the second stage of Afro-American historiography would rest, it is not too much to say that George Washington Williams was responsible for the beginnings of Afro-American historiography. · 1. The Fisk Herald, January 1888, p. 8.· 2. Woodson's appraisal of Williams was found among his papers and made available to me by Dr. Charles H. Wesley when he was executive director of the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History, which had been founded by Woodson in 1915. John Hope Franklin, president-elect of the American Historical Society, has written a biography of George Washington Williams. He is the John Matthews Manly Distinguished Service Professor of History at the University of Chicago and the author of, among other works, From Slavery to Freedom: A History of Negro Americans and A Southern Odyssey: Travelers in the Antebellum North. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:NOTES AND DISCUSSIONS 95 OCKHAM ON INTUITIVE COGNITION t In the first part of what follows, I try to locate Ockham's theory of intuitive cognition in the context of one set of philosophical problems rather than another. The device I use is to emphasize the major error Ockham wants to avoid: "platonism" rather than scepticism. In the second part, I try to show how difficulties raised by some recent (...) commentary result from the wrong orientation. This very limited project involves neither exposition nor assessment of Ockham's proposed solutions for the philosophical problems. But hopefully it will prove useful or at least suggestive for others working in this or related areas in Ockham. According to Ockham, 2 someone can be said to hold to or cognize a proposition evidently when he knows it to be true. The paradigm of knowing something to be true is seeing that it follows from the premisses in a demonstrative syllogism. However, first principles, or any proposition per se nota, can also be known to be true or cognized evidently. And, what is most important for our purposes, contingent propositions can be cognized evidently when, as one might say, they are known in experience. When someone is looking at a white wall, to ~se one of Ockham's examples, he can cognize evidently the proposition "The wall is white." 3 i Aside from a few quotations, I have given only the location of references in Ockham. Only very extensive quotations would make the article self-sufficient or, for that matter, even be helpful to the reader. My effort is both tentative and parasitic on earlier commentary and can, perhaps, be excused from providing logistic support that would far exceed its own weight. Moreover, I have tried to direct the reader to the most convenient materials, using fairly common or obvious abbreviations for Ockham's writings and the symbols given in the brackets for each of these sources. [Baudry] L Baudry, Lexique philosophique de Guillaume d'Ockham (Paris, 1958). [McKeon] R. McKeon, Selections /tom Medieval Philosophers, Vol. II (New York, 1929). This almost literal translation of selected Quodlibeta is sufficient for my present purposes. The Strasbourg edition of 1491, of course, is not more readily available m the reimpression from Louvain, Editions de la Biblioth~que Sd., 1962. [OPW] P. Boehner, Ockham: Philosophical Writings (New York, 1957). The page numbers given are from the Nelson edition, containing both Latin and English. The Library of Liberal Arts (Bobbs-Merrill) edition which consists only of the English text runs from one to sixteen pages ahead as a result of numbering the blank pages at the beginning of each section. [Ordinatio] Opera Philosophica et Theologica (St. Bonaventure, N.Y., 1967). Vol. I: Scripture in Librum Primum Sententiarum Ordinatio, Prologus et Distinctio Prima, edited by G. Gal and S. Brown. The lines referred to are given as superscripts to the page numbers. a Expos. Physicorum, Prologue ([OPW] pp. 4-5). See also [Baudry] under scire and evidens. a The issue of translation raises a host of problems of varying degrees of philosophical importance. I am not settled in my own mind about the best English equivalents for many important terms, and in my translations and commentary I have not tried for consistency. In principle, I prefer odd or quaint terms, since they bear their faults on their 96 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY At one point, Ockham gives this description: Whoever knows some proposition evidently cannot dissent from that proposition by the power of the will alone, but it is necessary that he be persuaded by an argument more strongly moving his intellect to dissent, or it is necessary that he have forgotten something evidently known.4 Let me call your attention to the un-Cartesian way in which Ockham removes the judgement of some contingent (and all necessary) propositions from the (total) dominion of the will. I may remain silent or talk of something else, or I may avail myself of questions and conditionals, but if I intend to deal head-on with equals added to equals or (while looking at the white wall) with walls and whiteness, I cannot but assert that equals added to equals are equal or... (shrink)

Numbers and other mathematical objects are exceptional in having no locations in space or time or relations of cause and effect. This makes it difficult to account for the possibility of the knowledge of such objects, leading many philosophers to embrace nominalism, the doctrine that there are no such objects, and to embark on ambitious projects for interpreting mathematics so as to preserve the subject while eliminating its objects. This book cuts through a host of technicalities that have obscured previous (...) discussions of these projects, and presents clear, concise accounts of a dozen strategies for nominalistic interpretation of mathematics, thus equipping the reader to evaluate each and to compare different ones. The authors also offer critical discussion, rare in the literature, of the aims and claims of nominalistic interpretation, suggesting that it is significant in a very different way from that usually assumed. (shrink)

As the expansion of the Internet and the digital formatting of all kinds of creative works move us further into the information age, intellectual property issues have become paramount. Computer programs costing thousands of research dollars are now copied in an instant. People who would recoil at the thought of stealing cars, computers, or VCRs regularly steal software or copy their favorite music from a friend's CD. Since the Web has no national boundaries, these issues are international concerns. The contributors-philosophers, (...) legal theorists, and business scholars, among others-address questions such as: Can abstract ideas be owned? How does the violation of intellectual property rights compare to the violation of physical property rights? Can computer software and other digital information be protected? And how should legal systems accommodate the ownership of intellectual property in an information age? Intellectual Property is a lively examination of these and other issues, and an invaluable resource for librarians, lawyers, businesspeople, and scholars. (shrink)

Saul Kripke has been a major influence on analytic philosophy and allied fields for a half-century and more. His early masterpiece, _Naming and Necessity_, reversed the pattern of two centuries of philosophizing about the necessary and the contingent. Although much of his work remains unpublished, several major essays have now appeared in print, most recently in his long-awaited collection _Philosophical Troubles_. In this book Kripke’s long-time colleague, the logician and philosopher John P. Burgess, offers a thorough and self-contained guide (...) to all of Kripke’s published books and his most important philosophical papers, old and new. It also provides an authoritative but non-technical account of Kripke’s influential contributions to the study of modal logic and logical paradoxes. Although Kripke has been anything but a system-builder, Burgess expertly uncovers the connections between different parts of his oeuvre. Kripke is shown grappling, often in opposition to existing traditions, with mysteries surrounding the nature of necessity, rule-following, and the conscious mind, as well as with intricate and intriguing puzzles about identity, belief and self-reference. Clearly contextualizing the full range of Kripke’s work, Burgess outlines, summarizes and surveys the issues raised by each of the philosopher’s major publications. _Kripke_ will be essential reading for anyone interested in the work of one of analytic philosophy’s greatest living thinkers. (shrink)

John Burgess is the author of a rich and creative body of work which seeks to defend classical logic and mathematics through counter-criticism of their nominalist, intuitionist, relevantist, and other critics. This selection of his essays, which spans twenty-five years, addresses key topics including nominalism, neo-logicism, intuitionism, modal logic, analyticity, and translation. An introduction sets the essays in context and offers a retrospective appraisal of their aims. The volume will be of interest to a wide range of readers across (...) philosophy of mathematics, logic, and philosophy of language. (shrink)

What is the simplest and most natural axiomatic replacement for the set-theoretic definition of the minimal fixed point on the Kleene scheme in Kripke’s theory of truth? What is the simplest and most natural set of axioms and rules for truth whose adoption by a subject who had never heard the word "true" before would give that subject an understanding of truth for which the minimal fixed point on the Kleene scheme would be a good model? Several axiomatic systems, old (...) and new, are examined and evaluated as candidate answers to these questions, with results of Harvey Friedman playing a significant role in the examination. (shrink)

One textbook may introduce the real numbers in Cantor’s way, and another in Dedekind’s, and the mathematical community as a whole will be completely indifferent to the choice between the two. This sort of phenomenon was famously called to the attention of philosophers by Paul Benacerraf. It will be argued that structuralism in philosophy of mathematics is a mistake, a generalization of Benacerraf’s observation in the wrong direction, resulting from philosophers’ preoccupation with ontology.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:John P. Anton C. P. CAVAFY'S ARS POETICA ' It is generally recognized that Constantine P. Cavafy (1863-1933) was not born a poet but became one only through persistence and labor, reaching his "first step" sometime after the midpoint of his life. In his effort to assess the quality of his earlier poetic production and sharpen his sensitivity in facing self-criticism, he decided to put in writing his (...) personal thoughts on his work sometime in 1903. The text was written in English in a personal shorthand Cavafy had devised for his own use. It was found among the papers he left to A. Sengopoulos and published for the first time in 1963 by M. Peridis, who also supplied the suitable title Ars Poetica. It falls outside the scope of this essay to discuss the antecedents of this document. Taken as a whole, the text has all the clarity and directness required of a testament designed to serve as a personal guide and handbook. The problems it discusses are limited to the needs of the poet. In this regard, the Ars Poetica has neither the range of topics nor the theoretical scope of, for instance, Aristotle's Poetics. It is quite certain that the ideas that preoccupy Cavafy in the Ars Poetica had been on his mind for a period of years. However, the Ars Poetica is his first prose piece where he gives a systematic treatment to technical and critical issues directly related to the assessment of his work and his role as a poet. In order to project here a clear image of Cavafy's struggle to reach his technical maturity which came after 1910, we need first to discuss the persistent problems he faced during this crucial decade, then to examine the attitudes and values he embodied in certain representative early poems, and finally to relate them to the guiding principles he formulated in his self-addressed poetics of 1903. A number of interrelated problems confronted Cavafy in his late twenties and throughout his thirties. They emerged one by one, to 85 86Philosophy and Literature make more pressing the demand for a consistent solution and a complete recasting of his outlook. Coming to terms with them was extremely difficult. Aside from the emotional and sexual pressures he had to face alone, there was the absence of suitable ideas and conceptual tools to provide him with even the rudiments of an intellectual framework. Whatever he borrowed from Europe and England, or resurrected from his own Hellenic heritage, proved either beyond assimilation or insufficiently digested. The lingering issues fell roughly into four areas. (i) Despite his determination to devote his life to the writing of poetry, the quality of his work was discouraging. He knew this and as a result he often expressed uncertainty about his ability to proceed. Time and again he appeared suffering from a feeling of inadequacy, but nevertheless he sought to engage a reflective mood from which to draw encouragement and hope. (ii) On the theoretical side, he identified with the long tradition which assigned a coveted cultural role to the savant-poet as discloser of truth and spokesman for humanity; this despite the prevailing climate of opinion in his immediate environment which recognized no such high position in his case. Cavafy knew that his standing with the Greek community of Alexandria had gradually dwindled with the loss of family wealth and his lowly employment, and also that his expectations to be respected in his role as a poet and leader in communal affairs were futile. This denial of personal recognition in a society dominated by commerce and finance contributed to his mood of depression. The feeling of being an outcast, despite his associations with the upper social circles of Alexandria, became a constant irritant to his sense of pride. (iii) The course of culture, the destiny of human institutions and the workings of history, became puzzles as he tried to view them through the opaque glass of disillusionment. These were the grand themes actively discussed in the writings of leading European intellectuals, but to the young poet they had a different personal urgency. His vital concern in this connection was not understanding science... (shrink)

Darwinism, Democracy, and Race examines the development and defence of an argument that arose at the boundary between anthropology and evolutionary biology in twentieth-century America. In its fully articulated form, this argument simultaneously discredited scientific racism and defended free human agency in Darwinian terms. The volume is timely because it gives readers a key to assessing contemporary debates about the biology of race. By working across disciplinary lines, the book's focal figures--the anthropologist Franz Boas, the cultural anthropologist Alfred Kroeber, the (...) geneticist Theodosius Dobzhansky, and the physical anthropologist Sherwood Washburn--found increasingly persuasive ways of cutting between genetic determinist and social constructionist views of race by grounding Boas's racially egalitarian, culturally relativistic, and democratically pluralistic ethic in a distinctive version of the genetic theory of natural selection. Collaborators in making and defending this argument included Ashley Montagu, Stephen Jay Gould, and Richard Lewontin. Darwinism, Democracy, and Race will appeal to advanced undergraduates, graduate students, and academics interested in subjects including Philosophy, Critical Race Theory, Sociology of Race, History of Biology and Anthropology, and Rhetoric of Science. (shrink)

In this paper Sullins argues that in certain circumstances robots can be seen as real moral agents. A distinction is made between persons and moral agents such that, it is not necessary for a robot to have personhood in order to be a moral agent. I detail three requirements for a robot to be seen as a moral agent. The first is achieved when the robot is significantly autonomous from any programmers or operators of the machine. The second is when (...) one can analyze or explain the robot's behavior only by ascribing to it some predisposition or 'intention' to do good or harm. And finally, robot moral agency requires the robot to behave in a way that shows and understanding of responsibility to some other moral agent. Robots with all of these criteria will have moral rights as well as responsibilities regardless of their status as persons. (shrink)

This book surveys the assortment of methods put forth for fixing Frege's system, in an attempt to determine just how much of mathematics can be reconstructed in ...

The debate over whether brain death is death has focused on whether individuals who have sustained total brain failure have satisfied the biological definition of death as “the irreversible loss of the integration of the organism as a whole.” In this paper, I argue that what it means for an organism to be integrated “as a whole” is undefined and vague in the views of those who attempt to define death as the irreversible loss of the integration of the organism (...) as a whole. I show how what it means for a living thing to be integrated as a whole depends on the sortal concept by which it is identified. Since interests, values, and ontological considerations besides strictly biological ones affect the concepts by which we individuate and identify living things, those non-biological considerations have a bearing on what it means for a particular kind of living thing to exist as a whole and thus what it means for one of us to die. Even if our bodies may remain organically integrated in some sense despite total brain failure, this fact should not lead us to reject brain death as death. Artificially sustained brain-dead human bodies are not human beings, but the remains of them. While such bodies may be alive in some sense, they are not human beings or human persons. They are not one of us. (shrink)

It is a fact of modern scientific thought that there is an enormous variety of logical systems - such as classical logic, intuitionist logic, temporal logic, and Hoare logic, to name but a few - which have originated in the areas of mathematical logic and computer science. In this book the author presents a systematic study of this rich harvest of logics via Tarski's well-known axiomatization of the notion of logical consequence. New and sometimes unorthodox treatments are given of the (...) underlying principles and construction of many-valued logics, the logic of inexactness, effective logics, and modal logics. Throughout, numerous historical and philosophical remarks illuminate both the development of the subject and show the motivating influences behind its development. Those with a modest acquaintance of modern formal logic will find this to be a readable and not too technical account which will demonstrate the current diversity and profusion of logics. In particular, undergraduate and postgraduate students in mathematics, philosophy, computer science, and artificial intelligence will enjoy this introductory survey of the field. (shrink)

Philosophical Logic is a clear and concise critical survey of nonclassical logics of philosophical interest written by one of the world's leading authorities on the subject. After giving an overview of classical logic, John Burgess introduces five central branches of nonclassical logic, focusing on the sometimes problematic relationship between formal apparatus and intuitive motivation. Requiring minimal background and arranged to make the more technical material optional, the book offers a choice between an overview and in-depth study, and it balances (...) the philosophical and technical aspects of the subject.The book emphasizes the relationship between models and the traditional goal of logic, the evaluation of arguments, and critically examines apparatus and assumptions that often are taken for granted. Philosophical Logic provides an unusually thorough treatment of conditional logic, unifying probabilistic and model-theoretic approaches. It underscores the variety of approaches that have been taken to relevantistic and related logics, and it stresses the problem of connecting formal systems to the motivating ideas behind intuitionistic mathematics. Each chapter ends with a brief guide to further reading.Philosophical Logic addresses students new to logic, philosophers working in other areas, and specialists in logic, providing both a sophisticated introduction and a new synthesis. (shrink)

Saul Kripke has made fundamental contributions to a variety of areas of logic, and his name is attached to a corresponding variety of objects and results. 1 For philosophers, by far the most important examples are ‘Kripke models’, which have been adopted as the standard type of models for modal and related non-classical logics. What follows is an elementary introduction to Kripke’s contributions in this area, intended to prepare the reader to tackle more formal treatments elsewhere.2 2. WHAT IS A (...) MODEL THEORY? Traditionally, a statement is regarded as logically valid if it is an instance of a logically valid form, where a form is regarded as logically valid if every instance is true. In modern logic, forms are represented by formulas involving letters and special symbols, and logicians seek therefore to define a notion of model and a notion of a formula’s truth in a model in such a way that every instance of a form will be true if and only if a formula representing that form is true in every model. Thus the unsurveyably vast range of instances can be replaced for purposes of logical evaluation by the range of models, which may be more tractable theoretically and perhaps practically. Consideration of the familiar case of classical sentential logic should make these ideas clear. Here a formula, say (p & q) ∨ ¬p ∨ ¬q, will be valid if for all statements P.. (shrink)

Highlighting previously neglected democratic strains in Machiavelli's major writings, McCormick excavates institutions through which the common people of ancient, medieval, and Renaissance republics constrained the power of wealthy citizens and public magistrates, and he imagines how such institutions might be revived today.