We study the relations between two consequences of the Continuum Hypothesis discovered by Wacław Sierpiński, concerning uniform continuity of continuous functions and uniform convergence of sequences of real-valued functions, defined on subsets of the real line of cardinality continuum.

We study a strengthening of the notion of a perfectly meager set. We say that a subset A of a perfect Polish space X is countably perfectly meager in X, if for every sequence of perfect subsets $\{P_n: n \in \mathbb N\}$ of X, there exists an $F_\sigma $ -set F in X such that $A \subseteq F$ and $F\cap P_n$ is meager in $P_n$ for each n. We give various characterizations and examples of countably perfectly meager sets. We prove (...) that not every universally meager set is countably perfectly meager correcting an earlier result of Bartoszyński. (shrink)

... 243-) INTRODUCTION §§243- constitute the eighth 'chapter' of the book. Its point of departure is a natural query with respect to the conclusion of the ...

P. M. S. Hacker 1. The ‘confusion of psychology’ On the concluding page of what is now called ‘Part II’ of the Investigations, Wittgenstein wrote.

Chapter Promising in Law and Morals Promissory and contractual obligations raise many issues of common interest to philosophers and lawyers. ...

William P. Alston formulates and defends a realist conception of truth, which he calls alethic realism (from "aletheia", Greek for "truth").

Gordon Baker and I had been colleagues at St John’s for almost ten years when we resolved, in 1976, to undertake the task of writing a commentary on Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations. We had been talking about Wittgenstein since 1969, and when we cooperated in writing a long critical notice on the Philosophical Grammar in 1975, we found that working together was mutually instructive, intellectually stimulating and great fun. We thought that we still had much to say about Wittgenstein’s philosophy, and (...) it seemed to us that misinterpretations of passages in the Investigations were so extensive that it would be worth trying to write a detailed analytical commentary. It is difficult to recapture the excitement of those early days in being among the first to work on the microfilms and, subsequently, on the photocopies of Wittgenstein’s Nachlass. We spent many hundreds of hours poring over the typescripts and the often only semi-legible manuscripts, fascinated and privileged to be able to try to follow the development of the thoughts of a great philosophical genius. We talked endlessly about what we had found in Wittgenstein’s manuscripts and typescripts, and debated how it should be understood. The first fruit of our labours was Wittgenstein – Understanding and Meaning. Its guiding idea was to draw attention to the manner in which Wittgenstein linked the concepts of meaning, understanding and explanation, and so to bypass the connections between meaning, truth and truth-conditions that so fascinated philosophers of the 1970s, and to abandon the red-herring of assertion-conditions and anti-realism. After a hiatus of four years, during which time we wrote a controversial book entitled Frege – Logical Excavations and a polemical book on contemporary philosophy of language – Language, Sense. (shrink)

Having thought out the Enlightenment project of individualism, privacy, and autonomy to its end, Anglo-American ethical theory now finds itself unable to respond to the collapse of community in which the practices justified by this project have resulted. In the place of reasonable deliberation about the goals to be chosen and the means to them, we now, it seems, have only what MacIntyre has aptly called “interminable debate” among “rival” positions, debate in which each party merely contends with the others (...) for its own advantage. And this circumstance MacIntyre himself seems unable to escape despite his best efforts. In further elaborating Hans-Georg Gadamer’s hermeneutical reception of Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Kant, and Hegel, and in referring simultaneously to Edmund Burke’s parallel political rhetoric, among other tradition-oriented arguments in the English language, this book seeks a recollection of shared ethical principles, a recollection which alone, it is argued, might prevent the devolution of discussion into war with words and make possible some measure of consensus, however provisional and shadowed by dissent it will be. (shrink)

The Secret Doctrine comprises a virtual encyclopaedia of the "anciently universal wisdom-tradition" -- scarcely an issue of consequence in the broad range of human experience is left untouched. As part of the Secret Doctrine Centenary project, this 441-page Index provides ready access to the vast quantity of material from many cultures set forth in the SD's original two volumes published in 1888. Due to the topics covered, it is as much an index of ideas as it is of subjects, works, (...) persons, and proper names. To aid the reader, major subject entries are cross-referenced; foreign terms are identified by language and, where possible, given in both their 1888 spelling(s) and as modernly transliterated, often with one or two word definitions. Subentries are arranged alphabetically. Cited works and authors, whose titles or names are not given in the SD are placed in brackets for convenient identification. Also included is an Appendix of foreign phrases with translation and source reference -- all helping to make this Index an invaluable reference tool for students of The Secret Doctrine. (shrink)

Originally published in 1936, this book presents the ancient Greek text of the paraphrases and quotations of Zeno's philosophical arguments, together with a facing-page English translation and editorial commentary. Detailed notes are incorporated throughout and a bibliography is also included. This book will be of value to anyone with an interest in Zeno and ancient philosophy.

Scientific realists have suggested that changes in our scientific communities over the course of their history have rendered those communities progressively less vulnerable to the problem of unconcieved alternatives over time. I argue in response not only that the most fundamental historical transformations of the scientific enterprise have generated steadily mounting obstacles to revolutionary, transformative, or unorthodox scientific theorizing, but also that we have substantial independent evidence that the institutional apparatus of contemporary scientific inquiry fosters an exceedingly and increasingly theoretically (...) conservative form of that inquiry. I conclude that contemporary scientific communities are actually more vulnerable to the problem of unconceived alternatives than their historical predecessors, and I briefly suggest how we might seek to pursue scientific inquiry in a less theoretically conservative way. (shrink)

A succinct introduction to mathematical logic and set theory, which together form the foundations for the rigorous development of mathematics. Suitable for all introductory mathematics undergraduates, Notes on Logic and Set Theory covers the basic concepts of logic: first-order logic, consistency, and the completeness theorem, before introducing the reader to the fundamentals of axiomatic set theory. Successive chapters examine the recursive functions, the axiom of choice, ordinal and cardinal arithmetic, and the incompleteness theorems. Dr. Johnstone has included numerous exercises designed (...) to illustrate the key elements of the theory and to provide applications of basic logical concepts to other areas of mathematics. (shrink)

Amazing as it may be, to this day few commentaries on the treatises of Plotinus' Enneads are written. The classic ninth treatise, for example, has hardly been studied. This treatise, however, is of vital importance, because it is in this work that for the first time in the Enneads, the One in its superform emerges and Plotinus dwells on the remarkable phenomenon of a 'mystical union' of the soul with the One. A thorough analysis of the argument and its development (...) next to philosophical and philo-logical support will be welcome to any reader of this in-triguing but difficult treatise. These aims are pursued in the main part of Meijer's work, the commentary. The first part of the book, preceding the commentary, examines the philosophical history of the concept of the One and its status in the first eight treatises. This new approach to the problem of the One leads to striking conclusions. It appears that while Plotinus was writing these first eight treatises, the concept of the One developed from that of a Supreme Entity of a Mesoplatonian character, viz. the upper part of the mind, to One of a Superone above mind. This casts an entirely new light on the position of the One in Plotinus and that of the ninth treatise itself. The third part not only examines the mystical union as pictured in the ninth treatise, but also provides a full scale discussion of Plotinus' descriptions of this union in his en-tire work. The degree of unification, viz. the question whether a part of the mystic self remains intact during the unification, is a matter of vigorous scholarly debate. Meijer shows that, in spite of some inconsistencies in his doctrine about the union, one must accept that Plotinus basically considered the union as a complete absorption of the soul into the Supreme Entity. (shrink)

A range of empirical findings is first used to more precisely characterize our distinctive tendency to objectify or externalize moral demands and obligations, and it is then argued that this salient feature of our moral cognition represents a profound puzzle for evolutionary approaches to human moral psychology that existing proposals do not help resolve. It is then proposed that such externalization facilitated a broader shift to a vastly more cooperative form of social life by establishing and maintaining a connection between (...) the extent to which an agent is herself motivated by a given moral norm and the extent to which she uses conformity to that same norm as a criterion in evaluating candidate partners in social interaction generally. This connection ensures the correlated interaction necessary to protect those prepared to adopt increasingly cooperative, altruistic, and other prosocial norms of interaction from exploitation, especially as such norms were applied in novel ways and/or to novel circumstances and as the rapid establishment of new norms allowed us to reap still greater rewards from hypercooperation. A wide range of empirical findings is then used to support this hypothesis, showing why the status we ascribe to moral demands and considerations exhibits the otherwise puzzling combination of objective and subjective elements that it does, as well as showing how the need to effectively advertise our externalization of particular moral commitments generates features of our social interaction so familiar that they rarely strike us as standing in need of any explanation in the first place. (shrink)

This volume conveys that Indian philosophy has intricate and complex metaphysical and epistemological theories as other philosophies and that these disciplines – epistemology and metaphysics – are an essential part of Indian philosophy.

In this paper I start discussing "originalism" as a practice of interpretation purporting the intent of the framers as "the" governing factor in interpretation. My first step is to contrast it with the approach of non-interpretivism. Then I discuss "interpretation" itself as a package to depict social practices of meaning production, focusing on three peculiar historical settings : Alexandria, Scholasticism, and the "birth" of Hermeneutics. My aim is to show the "essentialist" move of posing the concept of "meaning" as a (...) key factor in the "ideology" of interpretation. Such a discussion is introductory to a reappraisal of the current debate about criticism and of the distinction between interpretation and use-of-the-texts. I then examine archeology as a radical alternative to interpretive practices. But my final step will be to shift away from the blunt opposition between interpretivism and non interpretivism, to suggest a more complex arrangement based on an ironic misuse of interpretivism, and a framing of interpretation as an antagonistic process. (shrink)

Modal interpretations take quantum mechanics as a theory which assigns at all times definite values to magnitudes of quantum systems. In the case of single systems, modal interpretations manage to do so without falling prey to the Kochen and Specker no-go theorem, because they assign values only to a limited set of magnitudes. In this paper I present two further no-go theorems which prove that two modal interpretations become nevertheless problematic when applied to more than one system. The first theorem (...) proves that the modal interpretation proposed by Kochen and by Dieks cannot correlate the values simultaneously assigned to three systems. The second and new theorem proves that the atomic modal interpretation proposed by Bacciagaluppi and Dickson and by Dieks cannot correlate the values simultaneously and sequentially assigned to two systems if one assumes that these correlations are uniquely related to the dynamics of the state of the systems. (shrink)

The existence of linked regularities in size among brain components across species is, by itself, not a strong argument against the importance of behavioral selection in brain evolution. A careful consideration of hominid brain evolution suggests that brain components can change their scaling relationships over time, and that behavioral selection was likely crucial. The best neuroanatomical index of a given behavioral ability can only be determined empirically, not through comparative analysis of brain anatomy alone.

Science is a form of distributed analysis involving both individual work that produces new knowledge and collaborative work to exchange information with the larger community. There are many particular ways in which individual and community can interact in science, and it is difficult to assess how efficient these are, and what the best way might be to support them. This paper reports on a series of experiments in this area and a prototype implementation using a research platform called CACHE. CACHE (...) both supports experimentation with different structures of interaction between individual and community cognition and serves as a prototype for computational support for those structures. We particularly focus on CACHE‐BC, the Bayes community version of CACHE, within which the community can break up analytical tasks into “mind‐sized” units and use provenance tracking to keep track of the relationship between these units. (shrink)

Driven by interests in workforce planning and patient safety, a growing body of literature has begun to identify the reality and the prevalence of missed nursing care, also specified as care left undone, rationed care or unfinished care. Empirical studies and conceptual considerations have focused on structural issues such as staffing, as well as on outcome issues – missed care/unfinished care. Philosophical and ethical aspects of unfinished care are largely unexplored. Thus, while internationally studies highlight instances of covert rationing/missed care/care (...) left undone – suggesting that nurses, in certain contexts, are actively engaged in rationing care – in terms of the nursing and nursing ethics literature, there appears to be a dearth of explicit decision-making frameworks within which to consider rationing of nursing care. In reality, the assumption of policy makers and health service managers is that nurses will continue to provide full care – despite reducing staffing levels and increased patient turnover, dependency and complexity of care. Often, it would appear that rationing/missed care/nursing care left undone is a direct response to overwhelming demands on the nursing resource in specific contexts. A discussion of resource allocation and rationing in nursing therefore seems timely. The aim of this discussion paper is to consider the ethical dimension of issues of resource allocation and rationing as they relate to nursing care and the distribution of the nursing resource. (shrink)

In this unique work, James P. Sterba argues that traditional ethics has yet to confront the three significant challenges posed by environmentalism, feminism, and multiculturalism. He maintains that while traditional ethics has been quite successful at dealing with the problems it faces, it has not addressed the possibility that its solutions to these problems are biased in favor of humans, men, and Western culture. In Three Challenges to Ethics: Environmentalism, Feminism, and Multiculturalism, Sterba examines each of these challenges. In the (...) case of environmentalism, he argues that traditional ethics must incorporate conflict resolution principles that favor nonhumans over humans in a significant range of cases. In terms of feminism, he maintains that traditional ethics should rule out gendered family structures and implement an ideal of androgyny. In regard to multiculturalism, he contends that traditional ethics must endorse an ethics that is secular in character and that can survive an extensive comparative evaluation of both Western and non-Western moral ideals and cultures. The only textbook devoted to this topic, Three Challenges to Ethics is an engaging text for introductory courses in ethics and moral problems and is also interesting and provocative reading for scholars and general readers. (shrink)

Current focus in the health care ethics literature on the character of the practitioner has a reputable pedigree. Rather than offer a staple diet of Aristotelian ethics in the undergraduate curricula, perhaps instead one should follow Murdoch's suggestion and help the practitioner to develop vision and moral imagination, because this has a practical rather than a theoretical aim. The imaginative capacity of the practitioner plays an important part in both the quality of the nurse's role enactment and the moral strategies (...) which the nurse uses. It also plays a central part in the practitioner's ability to communicate with a patient and in the type of person which the practitioner becomes. Can the moral imagination be stimulated and nurtured? Some philosophers and literary critics argue that not only is this possible, but that literature is the means of doing so. If this is the case then a place should be made for literature in already crowded health care curricula. (shrink)

'Johann Sommerville's is an impeccable textbook. Simply written, it provides exposition of Hobbes' arguments in the context of English and continental thought'. P. Springborg, University of Sydney, Political Studies, Vol. XL1, No 2 6/93 Thomas Hobbes was probably the greatest of British political theorists. Too often commentators have failed to grasp his meaning because they have ignored the historical context in which he wrote. Drawing on much recent scholarship and on many little-known seventeenth century sources, this book presents a lucid (...) and jargon-free examination of Hobbes' arguments, setting them against a background of the ideas of his contemporaries and of the political events of his lifetime. By viewing Hobbes in his context, the book both clarifies his theories and illuminates European thinking at a critical stage in the development of modern political ideas. (shrink)