A well-known epigram by Callimachus on the philosopher Diodorus Cronus reads as follows:The question of the third line, while perhaps recondite from a contemporary perspective, was clear in antiquity. The crows are asking ‘What follows ?’, in allusion to the Hellenistic disputes concerning the truth conditions of conditional propositions , disputes in which the views of Diodorus figured prominently.I agree with Sedley that the question of the last line is ‘much more problematic’. The common interpretation has been to read the (...) αθι as a form of αθις and to interpret it temporally. The result, in Pfeiffer's estimation, is ‘quomodo posthac erimus?’.This interpretation derives from Sextus Empiricus' discussion at M. 1.309–12 of the last two lines of the epigram. After crediting the grammarian with the ability to understand the allusion in the crows' first question , he proceeds to argue that the philosopher has a better chance than the grammarian of understanding the second question. But, to quote Sedley, Sextus ‘makes a ghastly mess of it’ when he attempts his own elucidation. According to an argument of Diodorus, a living thing does not die in the time in which it lives nor in a time in which it does not live. Hence, Sextus concludes, it must be the case that it never dies and, ‘if this is the case, we are always living and, according to him, we shall come to be hereafter ’. (shrink)

A well-known epigram by Callimachus on the philosopher Diodorus Cronus reads as follows:The question of the third line, while perhaps recondite from a contemporary perspective, was clear in antiquity. The crows are asking ‘What follows?’, in allusion to the Hellenistic disputes concerning the truth conditions of conditional propositions, disputes in which the views of Diodorus figured prominently.I agree with Sedley that the question of the last line is ‘much more problematic’. The common interpretation has been to read the αθι as (...) a form of αθις and to interpret it temporally. The result, in Pfeiffer's estimation, is ‘quomodo posthac erimus?’.This interpretation derives from Sextus Empiricus' discussion at M. 1.309–12 of the last two lines of the epigram. After crediting the grammarian with the ability to understand the allusion in the crows' first question, he proceeds to argue that the philosopher has a better chance than the grammarian of understanding the second question. But, to quote Sedley, Sextus ‘makes a ghastly mess of it’ when he attempts his own elucidation. According to an argument of Diodorus, a living thing does not die in the time in which it lives nor in a time in which it does not live. Hence, Sextus concludes, it must be the case that it never dies and, ‘if this is the case, we are always living and, according to him, we shall come to be hereafter ’. (shrink)

In 1995 Walker & Company published a small book authored by the professional writer Dava Sobel entitled Longitude: The Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time. Not only did the book sell exceptionally well; it also spawned a three‐hour film, Longitude, starring Jeremy Irons and Michael Gambon, and a new, lavishly illustrated work, The Illustrated Longitude, by Sobel and Harvard's William J. H. Andrewes. It is difficult to think of another book in (...) the history of science that has attained comparable success. Yet it seems that history of science journals have taken scant notice of the book; my efforts to locate reviews of Sobel's volume in history of science journals have turned up only a single review, that being in Italian. This is all the more distressing because the book and film present a very controversial view of Astronomer Royal Nevil Maskelyne. This is not the place to examine Sobel's recipe for success, but it seems relevant background in reviewing a book also written by a professional journalist, also published by Walker, and fairly comparable in format to Sobel's.The history of science is rich in fascinating stories that could delight a variety of readers. The story of the search for longitude in the eighteenth century is certainly one of these; the dramatic quest to discover Neptune in the mid nineteenth century is another. Put overly briefly, the latter is the story of the frustrated efforts of a young, personally diffident but intellectually bold Cambridge graduate, John Couch Adams, to convince either the director of the Cambridge Observatory or England's Astronomer Royal to look for a planet that Adams's calculations had told him must be located at a specific position. It is also the story of the brilliant and arrogant Urbain J. J. Leverrier, who had independently completed comparable calculations and who beat Adams to the discovery by persuading not one of his French colleagues but an astronomer at the Berlin Observatory to launch a search, which within a few hours had located Neptune. It is also the story of the immense controversy that followed and that has in the last few years been given a new twist with the recovery of key documents carried off to Chile from the Royal Greenwich Observatory.Tom Standage, science correspondent for the Economist and author of The Victorian Internet, has taken up the challenge of retelling the Neptune story, which had previously been treated in dozens of articles and in book‐length studies by John Pringle Nichol, Albert Glodin, Morton Grosser, and Patrick Moore. Moreover, Standage presents the Neptune narrative as the centerpiece in a story that stretches from William Herschel's discovery of Uranus to the discovery of Pluto in 1930 and even to the spectroscopic detection in the last few years of dozens of extra–solar system planets. Standage's clear and engaging prose is based on extensive reading in English and French sources, some manuscript work, and interviews with a number of the discoverers of extra–solar system planets. Although the book is bereft of footnotes, an annotated bibliography at its end partially fulfills their function. Numerous illustrations appear, but these tend to be rather dark and small.Although the book is generally reliable, some significant errors appear. For example, whereas Standage reports that William Herschel did not see Uranus alter in size, Herschel observed its diameter nearly double in the two months after his first observation of it. It is John, not William, Herschel who is buried in Westminster Abbey. Benjamin Peirce's last name is misspelled , as is Christiaan Huygens's first name , and it is incorrect to say that Huygens “considered it was unlikely that there was life elsewhere in the solar system” . Also, because Lowell Observatory director Vesto Slipher played such a major role in the discovery of the planet Pluto by creating and directing the research program that enabled a recent high school graduate, Clyde Tombaugh, to be the first to recognize the planet on a photographic plate, it seems inappropriate that Standage makes no mention of Slipher in recounting the discovery of Pluto.Overall this is a highly engaging story, well told and based on good sources. One would hope that it may follow Longitude into film, at least a documentary, and that other authors and publishers will recognize the market for such exciting stories from the history of science. (shrink)

Experiential evidence shows that pain is associated with common meanings. These include a meaning of threat or danger, which is experienced as immediately distressing or unpleasant; cognitive meanings, which are focused on the long-term consequences of having chronic pain; and existential meanings such as hopelessness, which are more about the person with chronic pain than the pain itself. This interdisciplinary book - the second in the three-volume Meanings of Pain series edited by Dr Simon van Rysewyk - aims to better (...) understand pain by describing experiences of pain and the meanings these experiences hold for the people living through them. The lived experiences of pain described here involve various types of chronic pain, including spinal pain, labour pain, rheumatic pain, diabetic peripheral neuropathic pain, fibromyalgia, complex regional pain syndrome, endometriosis-associated pain, and cancer-related pain. Two chapters provide narrative descriptions of pain, recounted and interpreted by people with pain. Language is important to understanding the meaning of pain since it is the primary tool human beings use to manipulate meaning. As discussed in the book, linguistic meaning may hold clues to understanding some pain-related experiences, including the stigmatisation of people with pain, the dynamics of patient-clinician communication, and other issues, such as relationships between pain, public policy and the law, and attempts to develop a taxonomy of pain that is meaningful for patients. Clinical implications are described in each chapter. This book is intended for people with pain, their family members or caregivers, clinicians, researchers, advocates, and policy makers. (shrink)

Preface In these days, an anthology on the topic of possible worlds hardly needs justification. No issue has given rise to as much literature in the past ...

Sceptical theists--e.g., William Alston and Michael Bergmann--have claimed that considerations concerning human cognitive limitations are alone sufficient to undermine evidential arguments from evil. We argue that, if the considerations deployed by sceptical theists are sufficient to undermine evidential arguments from evil, then those considerations are also sufficient to undermine inferences that play a crucial role in ordinary moral reasoning. If cogent, our argument suffices to discredit sceptical theist responses to evidential arguments from evil.

Much has been published about the ethical issues encountered by clinicians in genetics/genomics, but those experienced by clinical laboratory scientists are less well described. Clinical laboratory scientists now frequently face navigating ethical problems in their work, but how they should be best supported to do this is underexplored. This lack of attention is also reflected in the ethics tools available to clinical laboratory scientists such as guidance and deliberative ethics forums, developed primarily to manage issues arising within the clinic.We explore (...) what ethical issues are being experienced by clinical scientists, how they think such issues could be best analysed and managed, and whether their practice might be enhanced by more situated approaches to ethics deliberation and practice such as ethical preparedness. From thematic analysis of cases presented by clinical scientists at a specially convened meeting of the UK Genethics Forum, we derived three main ethical themes: (1) the redistribution of labour and responsibilities resulting from the practice of genomic medicine; (2) the interpretation and certainty of results and (3) the proposal that better standardisation and consistency of ethical approaches (for example, more guidelines and policy) could resolve some of the challenges arising.We argue that although standardisation is important for promoting shared understandings of good (including ethical) practice, supplementary approaches to enhance and sustain ethical preparedness will be important to help clinical scientists and others in the recently expanded genetic/genomic medicine environment foster quality ethical thinking. (shrink)

The Oxford Handbook of Metaphysics offers the most authoritative and compelling guide to this diverse and fertile field of philosophy. Twenty-four of the world's most distinguished specialists provide brand-new essays about 'what there is': what kinds of things there are, and what relations hold among entities falling under various categories. They give the latest word on such topics as identity, modality, time, causation, persons and minds, freedom, and vagueness. The Handbook's unrivaled breadth and depth make it the definitive reference work (...) for students and academics across the philosophical spectrum. (shrink)

The food industry faces many significant risks from public criticism of corporate social responsibility (CSR) issues in the supply chain. This paper draws upon previous research and emerging industry trends to develop a comprehensive framework of supply chain CSR in the industry. The framework details unique CSR applications in the food supply chain including animal welfare, biotechnology, environment, fair trade, health and safety, and labor and human rights. General supply chain CSR issues such as community and procurement are also considered. (...) Ultimately, the framework serves as a comprehensive tool to support food industry practitioners and researchers in the assessment of strategic and operational supply chain CSR practices. (shrink)

A benchmark volume at the intersection of philosophy and religion.

_The Metaphysics of Perfect Beings_ addresses the problems an Anselmian perfect being faces in contexts involving unlimited options. Recent advances in the theory of vagueness, the metaphysics of multiverses and hyperspace, the theory of dynamic or sequential choice, the logic of moral and rational dilemmas, and metaethical theory provide the resources to formulate the new challenges and the Anselmian responses with an unusual degree of precision. Almeida shows that the challenges arising in the unusual contexts involving unlimited options sometimes produce (...) metaphysical surprise. (shrink)

Higher-Order Logic (HOL) is a proof development system intended for applications to both hardware and software. It is principally used in two ways: for directly proving theorems, and as theorem-proving support for application-specific verification systems. HOL is currently being applied to a wide variety of problems, including the specification and verification of critical systems. Introduction to HOL provides a coherent and self-contained description of HOL containing both a tutorial introduction and most of the material that is needed for day-to-day work (...) with the system. After a quick overview that gives a "hands-on feel" for the way HOL is used, there follows a detailed description of the ML language. The logic that HOL supports and how this logic is embedded in ML, are then described in detail. This is followed by an explanation of the theorem-proving infrastructure provided by HOL. Finally two appendices contain a subset of the reference manual, and an overview of the HOL library, including an example of an actual library documentation. (shrink)

What is the value of having medical students engage in creative production as part of their learning? Creating something new requires medical students to take risks and even to fail--something they tend to be neither accustomed to nor comfortable with doing. “Making stuff” can help students prepare for such failures in a controlled environment that doesn’t threaten their professional identities. Furthermore, doing so can facilitate students becoming resilient and creative problem-solvers who strive to find new ways to address vexing questions. (...) Though creating something new can be fun, this is not the main outcome of interest. Rather, the principle reason we recommend devoting precious curricular time to creative endeavors is because it helps medical students become better doctors. (shrink)

The paper examines the problematic understanding of “risk” in entrepreneurial literature that locates courage in either the loss orgain of having or in the difficulty and hardship of the doing. We argue in this paper that what is lost in this vernacular view of courage is a deeper notion of the subjective dimension of work and the social need of society. Grounded within the Catholic social and moral tradition, we find a richer notion of courage, which in part corrects and (...) rounds out the insufficient description of the vernacular understanding of courage in entrepreneurship. What we also find in this account of the virtues and subjective dimension of work is greater explanatory power of what happens to the entrepreneur in the work that he or she does. The end result of this analysis is a more spiritual, ethical and social understanding of entrepreneurship. (shrink)

Some carnivores defend the position that the opportunistic consumption of meat is morally permissible even under the assumption that it is morally wrong to act in ways that ause unnecessary suffering to sentient beings. Ordering and consuming chicken once a week, they argue, will not increase the numbers of chickens suffering or slaughtered, since the system of purchasing and farming chickens is not sufficiently fine‐tuned to register differences at margin. We argue that, insensitivity of the market notwithstanding, consistent consequentialists are (...) morally prohibited from each additional purchase and consumption of meat. (shrink)

This paper criticizes the pragma-dialectical conception of a fallacy, according to which a fallacy is an argumentative speech act which violates one or more of the rules of 'rational discussion'. That conception is found to be neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for committing a fallacy. It is also found wanting in several other respects.

Over the last decade a handful of cognitive models of religious belief have begun to coalesce in the literature. Attempts to offer “scientific explanations of religious belief ” are nothing new, stretching back at least as far as David Hume, and perhaps as far back as Cicero. What is also not new is a belief that scientific explanations of religious belief serve in some way to undermine the justification for those beliefs.

The paper examines the problematic understanding of “risk” in entrepreneurial literature that locates courage in either the loss orgain of having or in the difficulty and hardship of the doing. We argue in this paper that what is lost in this vernacular view of courage is a deeper notion of the subjective dimension of work and the social need of society. Grounded within the Catholic social and moral tradition, we find a richer notion of courage, which in part corrects and (...) rounds out the insufficient description of the vernacular understanding of courage in entrepreneurship. What we also find in this account of the virtues and subjective dimension of work is greater explanatory power of what happens to the entrepreneur in the work that he or she does. The end result of this analysis is a more spiritual, ethical and social understanding of entrepreneurship. (shrink)

Property-identical divine-command theory (PDCT) is the view that being obligatory is identical to being commanded by God in just the way that being water is identical to being H2O. If these identity statements are true, then they express necessary a posteriori truths. PDCT has been defended in Robert M. Adams (1987) and William Alston (1990). More recently Mark C. Murphy (2002) has argued that property-identical divine-command theory is inconsistent with two well-known and well-received theses: the free-command thesis and the supervenience (...) thesis. I show that Murphy's argument is vitiated by mistaken assumptions about the substitutivity of metaphysical identicals in contexts of supervenience. The free-command thesis and the supervenience thesis therefore pose no serious threat to PDCT. (Published Online August 11 2004). (shrink)

We highlight connections between accessible categories and abstract elementary classes , and provide a dictionary for translating properties and results between the two contexts. We also illustrate a few applications of purely category-theoretic methods to the study of AECs, with model-theoretically novel results. In particular, the category-theoretic approach yields two surprising consequences: a structure theorem for categorical AECs, and a partial stability spectrum for weakly tame AECs.

Droysen sought to exploit, for practical political effect, a vision of history as an integral, progressive, and fathomable continuum, and hence in his writings subordinated historical individuality to history's discernible teleology. Droysen's methodological opponent, Rankean historicism, was to the right of his centrist politics. Droysen insisted against Ranke that history is not something "out there" that can be dispassionately and scientifically analyzed but is man's ontological ground. He was basically a moderate Young Hegelian: historians can be scholars and yet ally (...) with and further the rational dynamism of history's normative Ideas because those Ideas are their own as progressive human beings. This battle between Ranke and Droysen illustrates that the evolution of German historical hermeneutics at mid-nineteenth century was generated both by a deep conflict within the German historical tradition and by the confrontation of that tradition with positivism. (shrink)

We develop a framework for assessing security market quality, relating five elements of market design to three metrics of market integrity and two metrics of market efficiency. We empirically implement this integrity–efficiency MQ framework by testing a hypothesis that trade-based ramping manipulation at the close raises execution costs on 24 security markets worldwide. Estimating a simultaneous equations model of ramping incidence, spreads, and the probability of deploying real-time surveillance, we show that quoted bid-ask spreads are positively related to the incidence (...) of MTC across seven liquidity deciles. The magnitude is economically significant; improving market integrity by cutting MTC in half reduces spreads 6–11 %. Allowing direct market access in conjunction with RTS, conducting auctions at the close, and developing regulations that require surveillance, all reduce MTC and thereby lower spreads, assuring better market integrity and enhancing market efficiency. Introducing circuit breakers or prohibiting shorts poses integrity–efficiency tradeoffs. (shrink)