The study of graph structure has advanced in recent years with great strides: finite graphs can be described algebraically, enabling them to be constructed out of more basic elements. Separately the properties of graphs can be studied in a logical language called monadic second-order logic. In this book, these two features of graph structure are brought together for the first time in a presentation that unifies and synthesizes research over the last 25 years. The author not only provides a thorough (...) description of the theory, but also details its applications, on the one hand to the construction of graph algorithms, and, on the other to the extension of formal language theory to finite graphs. Consequently the book will be of interest to graduate students and researchers in graph theory, finite model theory, formal language theory, and complexity theory. (shrink)

"Dans l'Espagne du XVe au XVIIe siècle, avec les grands voyages et les explorations de mondes inconnus, l'art de bâtir des palais ou des jardins, d'écrire un voyage expérimental ou une quête mystique, de peindre des paysages et des gloires célestes témoigne d'un renouvellement du regard - philosophique, alchimique, théologique, politique. Habiter le monde s'inscrit dans une perspective géométrique et mystique de l'infini et de l'éternité. Il y aurait peut-être là la marque d'une spécificité hispanique. L'ouvrage s'articule autour de quatre (...) parties consacrées aux palais, jardins et demeures spirituelles, aux merveilles de l'univers de Séville à Mexico, à la mystique des paysages et à la magie naturelle, à la représentation de l'infini" --. (shrink)

Cet ouvrage étudie la langue du vrai dans la première modernité. La vérité dépend-elle d'une belle énonciation? Y a-t-il des règles institutionnelles spécifiques d'énonciation de la vérité? Pourquoi la doctrina constitue-t-elle l'horizon de tout savoir et de tout enseignement prétendant à la vérité?

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:...

entre judaïsme, christianisme et islam Dominique de Courcelles. PRÉFACE Le fou de Dieu - celui qui, déployant la logique du discours de Paul sur la folie de la Croix, échange la folie aux yeux du monde contre la sagesse aux yeux de Dieu,  ...

Summer 2010 was marked by one of the worst environmental disasters ever experienced on a global scale. Following the explosion of the oil rig Deepwater Horizon on April 20—the drilling platform for British Petroleum—thousands of tons of crude oil spilled into the Gulf of Mexico. As a result, water and energy came together in ways that had the potential to do tremendous damage to the land and the air, which were invaded by an oil slick and toxic gases. This was (...) clearly a man-made crisis, which the world watched with shock and dismay. In the aftermath of this event and the chaos caused by greed and incompetence, it is important to remind humanity of what it might have forgotten. Ancient philosophy .. (shrink)

On June 13, 323 BCE, Alexander the Great, king of the Greeks, died at Babylon at the age of thirty-three. He had conquered a large part of the known world—the oikoumenē of the Greeks—and he had pushed back the eastern limits of the universe by advancing into India as far as the basin of the Ganges. He had also done everything in his power to give birth to a myth around his person, a myth that endures to this day. Alexander (...) came to power in 336 BCE, at the age of twenty, after his father, Philip II, king of Macedon, had been assassinated. He was the cherished pupil of Aristotle, who followed him in his ventures and dedicated a treatise to him entitled Rhetoric to Alexander. He went to war in Asia against the .. (shrink)

La passion de l'unité : tel semble avoir été l'un des principaux moteurs de l'activité diplomatique et intellectuelle du cardinal Nicolas de Cues (1401-1464).

Was man Fruhe Neuzeit nennt, ist durch ausserordentliche Ereignisse gepragt, die die uberlieferten Welterklarungen in Frage stellen. Nicht nur die Erfahrungswelt andert sich, auch die Welt der Wissenschaft. Wunderbar ist etwas, das bestehende Diskurse nicht bestatigt, sondern herausfordert. Es widerspricht dem Gewohnten und ist erklarungsbedurftig. Die Kernfrage ist nun, bis wohin es im Kontext der Fruhen Neuzeit gelang, das Wunderbare zu erfassen und zu erklaren, und von welchem Punkt an die traditionellen Diskurse vom Wunderbaren widerlegt und falsifiziert wurden, so dass (...) neue Ordnungen gesucht werden mussten. Wie weit konnen traditionelle Ordnungen im Interesse von Erklarungen erweitert und verandert werden? Gelingt es den neuen Ordnungen, das Wunderbare aufzulosen und als 'Explanandum' logisch aus anderen Tatsachen und ubergeordneten Naturgesetzen abzuleiten? Wie wird die Konkurrenz zwischen den Diskursen in den zeitgenossischen Texten erortert? Der vorliegende Band umfasst Beitrage renommierter Wissenschaftlerinnen und Wissenschaftler aus dem In- und Ausland, die sich dem Wunderbaren im Zugriff der Vernunft in der fruhen Neuzeit aus unterschiedlichen Blickwinkeln widmen. (shrink)

The New Evil Demon problem has been hotly debated since the case was introduced in the early 1980’s (e.g. Lehrer and Cohen 1983; Cohen 1984), and there seems to be recent increased interest in the topic. In a forthcoming collection of papers on the New Evil Demon problem (Dutant and Dorsch, forthcoming), at least two of the papers, both by prominent epistemologists, attempt to resist the problem by appealing to the distinction between justification and excuses. My primary aim here is (...) to critically evaluate this new excuse maneuver as a response to the New Evil Demon problem. -/- Their response attempts to give us reason to reject the idea that victims of the New Evil Demon have justification for believing as they do. I shall argue that this approach is ultimately unsuccessful, however much of value can be learned from these attempts. In particular, progress in the debate can be made by following those who advance the excuse maneuver and make explicit the connection between epistemic justification and epistemic norms. By doing so, the questions being debated are clarified, as is the methodology being used to attempt to answer them. (shrink)

The order of discovery can have a profound effect upon the way in which we think about the function of a gene. In E. coli, recA is nearly essential for cell survival in the presence of DNA damage. However, recA was originally identified, as a gene required to obtain recombinant DNA molecules in conjugating bacteria. As a result, it has been frequently assumed that recA promotes the survival of bacteria containing DNA damage by recombination in which DNA strand exchanges occur. (...) We now know that several of the processes that interact with or are controlled by recA, such as excision repair and translesion synthesis, operate to ensure that DNA replication occurs processively without strand exchanges. Yet the view persists in the literature that recA functions primarily to promote recombination during DNA repair. With the benefit of hindsight and more than three decades of additional research, we reexamine some of the classical experiments that established the concept of DNA repair by recombination, and we consider the possibilities that recombination is not an efficient mechanism for rescuing damaged cells, and that recA may be important for maintaining processive replication in a manner that does not generally promote recombination. BioEssays 23:463–470, 2001. © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. (shrink)

There are various equivalent formulations of the Church-Turing thesis. A common one is that every effective computation can be carried out by a Turing machine. The Church-Turing thesis is often misunderstood, particularly in recent writing in the philosophy of mind.

We prove that every monadic second-order property of the unfolding of a transition system is a monadic second-order property of the system itself. An unfolding is an instance of the general notion of graph covering. We consider two more instances of this notion. A similar result is possible for one of them but not for the other.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:...

In every undirected graph or, more generally, in every undirected hypergraph of bounded rank, one can specify an orientation of the edges or hyperedges by monadic second-order formulas using quantifications on sets of edges or hyperedges. The proof uses an extension to hypergraphs of the classical notion of a depth-first spanning tree. Applications are given to the characterization of the classes of graphs and hypergraphs having decidable monadic theories.