The proof theory of many-valued systems has not been investigated to an extent comparable to the work done on axiomatizatbility of many-valued logics. Proof theory requires appropriate formalisms, such as sequent calculus, natural deduction, and tableaux for classical (and intuitionistic) logic. One particular method for systematically obtaining calculi for all finite-valued logics was invented independently by several researchers, with slight variations in design and presentation. The main aim of this report is to develop the proof theory of finite-valued first order (...) logics in a general way, and to present some of the more important results in this area. In Systems covered are the resolution calculus, sequent calculus, tableaux, and natural deduction. This report is actually a template, from which all results can be specialized to particular logics. (shrink)

Logic has pride of place in mathematics and its 20th century offshoot, computer science. Modern symbolic logic was developed, in part, as a way to provide a formal framework for mathematics: Frege, Peano, Whitehead and Russell, as well as Hilbert developed systems of logic to formalize mathematics. These systems were meant to serve either as themselves foundational, or at least as formal analogs of mathematical reasoning amenable to mathematical study, e.g., in Hilbert’s consistency program. Similar efforts continue, but have been (...) expanded by the development of sophisticated methods to study the properties of such systems using proof and model theory. In parallel with this evolution of logical formalisms as tools for articulating mathematical theories (broadly speaking), much progress has been made in the quest for a mechanization of logical inference and the investigation of its theoretical limits, culminating recently in the development of new foundational frameworks for mathematics with sophisticated computer-assisted proof systems. In addition, logical formalisms developed by logicians in mathematical and philosophical contexts have proved immensely useful in describing theories and systems of interest to computer scientists, and to some degree, vice versa. Three examples of the influence of logic in computer science are automated reasoning, computer verification, and type systems for programming languages. (shrink)

This study reconstructs the relationship between philosophy and politics in the way in which Heidegger's failure as a politician influenced the redevelopment of philosophy in the 1930s. The author also explains how Heidegger's failure influenced the content and direction of his later work.

Studies the politics of Heidegger in terms of "thrownness" or "existential contingency". Attempts to think through Heidegger's philosophy in a manner that parallels his own dialogue with other key western thinkers.

In American, the terms “schism,” “heresy,” “sect,” and “cult” have been used to describe splinter groups as they distinguish themselves from the majority religion. The term cult has been used in two different senses. Within the Roman Catholic Church a group’s devotion to a particular saint may earn them the title “Cult of” that particular saint. However, among contemporary American Protestants the term cult has come to be applied to religious groups that split from mainstream Christianity with regard to their (...) beliefs and behavior to the degree that the groups are considered dangerous to themselves and society. When it comes to defining what a cult is, only about ten percent of the attention is placed on a cult’s beliefs and ninety percent is placed on a cult’s behavior. In fact, there seems to be a general squeamishness about using the term cult in the first place. There are several reasons for this malaise toward the term, but this article will argue that the term cult can and should be used in general and scholarly contexts. (shrink)

Despite their differences in origin, the three influential schools of twentieth-century continental cultural criticism--the Frankfurt School, existentialism, and poststructuralism--have long been treated as an ensemble and with critical hesitancy. Examining these schools as responses to the apparent collapse of Western civilization in the twentieth-century and as formidable intellectual challenges to the cultural legacies of the Enlightenment, this book provides a productive base for criticism and broadens our understanding of their histories and reception.

Having visited Ireland regularly during the 1930s, Ludwig Wittgenstein resigned his Cambridge philosophy professorship in 1947 and moved there, living in a fishing village on the Atlantic coast and hotels in Dublin and the Wicklow Mountains. Although Wittgenstein spent some time out of the country, Ireland was effectively his base for three very productive years during which he worked on what would become one of his key books, the posthumously published Philosophical Investigations. Wittgenstein in Ireland represents the first sustained account (...) of Wittgenstein's time in Ireland, placing it in its historical context. Wall pays a good deal of attention to the representation of the Irish landscape in which the Austrian philosopher found himself able to work; a large part of his writings were produced in the bleak landscapes of Ireland and Norway. (shrink)

Methods available for the axiomatization of arbitrary finite-valued logics can be applied to obtain sound and complete intelim rules for all truth-functional connectives of classical logic including the Sheffer stroke and Peirce’s arrow. The restriction to a single conclusion in standard systems of natural deduction requires the introduction of additional rules to make the resulting systems complete; these rules are nevertheless still simple and correspond straightforwardly to the classical absurdity rule. Omitting these rules results in systems for intuitionistic versions of (...) the connectives in question. (shrink)

Textbook on Gödel’s incompleteness theorems and computability theory, based on the Open Logic Project. Covers recursive function theory, arithmetization of syntax, the first and second incompleteness theorem, models of arithmetic, second-order logic, and the lambda calculus.

This classic, provocative introduction to classical metaphysical questions focuses on appreciating the problems, rather than attempting to proffer answers.

Drawing on case studies from around the world - including Iran, Guatemala, USA and Mexico - this collection documents how transnational human rights discourses and legal institutions are materialised, imposed, resisted and transformed in a variety of contexts.

Written by a former student of Heidegger, this book examines the relationship between the philosophy and the politics of a celebrated teacher and the allure that Nazism held out for scholars committed to revolutionary nihilism.

The major mechanism of repair of damage to DNA involves a conceptually simple process of enzymatic excision and resynthesis of small regions of DNA. In man and other mammals, this process is regulated by several gene loci; up to 15 mutually complementary genes or gene products may be involved. Repair deficiency results in an array of clinical symptoms in skin, central nervous system, and hematopoietic and immune systems, the major example being xeroderma pigmentosum (XP), a disease with a high incidence (...) of cancer. Cloning repair genes by straightforward methods has proved difficult, but we have begun the effort by demonstrating that correction of a human repair deficiency can be achieved by transferring very small fragments of DNA from normal hamsters into XP cells. One of the complementation groups of XP cells (group C) appears to express a change in gene regulation such that these cells repair only a small clustered region of the DNA with high efficiency. (shrink)

In a period in which capital has been on the offensive for many years, using debt and financial crises as rationales for wielding austerity to hammer down wages and social services and terrorism as an excuse for attacking civil liberties, it is important to realize that the origins of this long period of crisis lay in the struggles of people to free their lives from the endless subordination to work within a society organized as a gigantic social factory. In both (...) the self-proclaimed capitalist West and socialist East the managers of that subordination, whether in private enterprise or the state, repeatedly found their plans undermined by people who refused to play by their rules and who elaborated activities and social relationships that escaped their control. The refusal of their rules meant crisis for the managers; the elaboration of other ways of being—whether characterized as the crafting of civil society or as autonomous self-valorization—meant crisis for and freedom from society-as-work-machine. As always, the capitalist response has involved instrumentalization and repression; basically its managers have sought to harness what they could and eliminate what they could not. For a long time instrumentali-zation was most obvious in the West and repression was most obvious in the East, yet both were always at play everywhere, and everywhere those responses were resisted and often escaped. It was that resistance and those escapes that led to the unleashing of the monetary weapons of financialization and their current employment to convert crisis-for-capital into crisis-for-us. It is in past and present resistance and escapes that we must discover both our weaknesses and our strengths in order to overcome capital’s current offensive and to elaborate new worlds. It is the overall thesis of this paper that Marx’s labor theory of value still provides vital aid in helping us understand these historical developments. (shrink)

In this study, Worsley argues that it is rational to believe in a loving God in the face of evil. Beginning with a critique of Alvin Plantinga, he shows that human freedom is highly complex, and so depends upon complex structures in nature. These are both necessary for freedom but also sufficient for natural evil. He offers close analysis of the evolution of the human brain. The book develops a parallel argument that human evil stems from the evolution of personality.

. History of the concept of economic efficiency . INTRODUCTION James Buchanan won the Nobel Prize by proving that the process by which elected officials ...

This book is the complete story of the creation of the universe, as it was understood by the ancient Egyptians. It is a collection of harmonic and radical 'Black Thoughts' and the pursuit of equality for all of this planet's inhabitants"--P. vii.

This book gives a descriptive analysis of specific Madhyamika texts. It compares the ideology of Kumarajiva (a translator of the four Madhyamika treatises 400 A.D.) with the ideologies of the three Chinese contemporaries - HuiYuan, Seng-Jui and Seng-Chao. It envisages an intercultural transmission of religious and philosophical ideas from India to China.

Drawing on a passage from Ramsey's Truth and Probability, we formulate a simple, plausible constraint on evaluating the accuracy of credences: the Calibration Test. We show that any additive, continuous accuracy measure that passes the Calibration Test will be strictly proper. Strictly proper accuracy measures are known to support the touchstone results of accuracy-first epistemology, for example vindications of probabilism and conditionalization. We show that our use of Calibration is an improvement on previous such appeals by showing how it answers (...) or sidesteps problems that have been raised for previous work in this area. (shrink)

2010 Reprint of 1905 edition.This work is the magnum opus of Bucke's career, a project that he researched and wrote over many years. In it, Bucke described his own experience, that of contemporaries, and the experiences and outlook of historical figures including Buddha, Jesus, Paul, Plotinus, Muhammad, Dante, Francis Bacon, and William Blake. Bucke developed a theory involving three stages in the development of consciousness: the simple consciousness of animals; the self-consciousness of the mass of humanity ; and cosmic consciousness (...) - an emerging faculty and the next stage of human development. Among the effects of this progression, he believed he detected a lengthy historical trend in which religious conceptions and theologies had become less and less fearful. A classic work. (shrink)

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has developed a novel framework for assessing and communicating uncertainty in the findings published in their periodic assessment reports. But how should these uncertainty assessments inform decisions? We take a formal decision-making perspective to investigate how scientific input formulated in the IPCC’s novel framework might inform decisions in a principled way through a normative decision model.

Part I The Imperative Mood 'Virtue, then, is a disposition governing our choices '. ARISTOTLE, Eth. Nic. 36 Prescriptive Language. ...

The attempt to find usable diagrams fornterms of the sort devised by John Venn seems to have originated with Venn himself, who published diagrams for up to five classes (the fifth class, however, was shaped like a doughnut, and contained an area outside itself — like the hole in the doughnut). Venn then suggested that “if we wanted to use a diagram forsixterms (x, y, z, w, v, u) the best plan would probably be to taketwofive-term figures, one for theupart (...) and one for the non-upart of all the other combinations …” Such a method would, as Venn admits, be somewhat confusing to the eye, and thus fail to fulfil one of the major purposes of the diagram; nevertheless, it is a method which could be extended to covernclasses.Venn also suggests (but without illustration) another method for drawing diagrams fornterms: “… the rule of formation would be very simple. We should merely have to begin by drawing any closed figure, and then proceed to draw others subject to the one condition that each intersect once, and once only, all the existing subdivisions produced by those which had gone before.” Then, in a rather surprising footnote, he adds: “It will be found that when we adhere to continuous figures, instead of the discontinuous five-term figure given above, there is a tendency for the resultant outlines thus successively drawn to assume a comb-like shape after the first four or five. If we begin by circles or other rounded figures the teeth are curved, if by parallelograms then they are straight. (shrink)

This article reports on an exploratory study that used metaphoric objects as a therapeutic aid. During Rogerian therapy sessions, a metaphoric object was handed to clients. The metaphoric object was used as a reflection of an aspect of the client's being. The clients were asked to describe the effect the object had on them. The protocols obtained were subjected to a phenomenological analysis. The study indicates that metaphoric objects can be a useful therapeutic aid.