The First Conference of the International Society for the Study of Time was held at the Mathematisches Forschungsinstitut at Oberwolfach in the Black Forest, Federal Republic of Germany from Sunday, 31 August to Saturday, 6 September, 1969. The origin of this conference and the formation of the Society goes back to a proposal due to J. T. Fraser that was discussed at a conference on "Interdisciplinary Perspectives of Time" held by the New York Academy of Sciences in January, 1966. (...) It was unanimously agreed than that an international society should be formed on an interdisciplinary basis with the object of stimulating interest in all problems concerning 'time and that this object could best be attained by means of conferences held at regular intervals. J. T. Fraser was elected Secretary, S. Watanabe Treasurer, and I was elected President. It was agreed, at my suggestion, that the organization of the first conference of the newly formed Society be left to a committee of these three officers, on the understanding that they would invite authorities on the role of time in the various special sciences and humanities to form an Advisory Board to assist them. One of the main difficulties in seeking support for an interdisciplinary conference is that most foundations confine their interest exclusively either to the sciences or to the humanities. (shrink)

The Second Conference of the International Society for the Study of Time was held at Hotel Mt. Fuji, near Lake Yamanaka, Japan, on July I to 7,1973. The present volume is the proceedings at that Con ference and constitutes the second volume in The Study of Time series. * At the closing session of our First Conference in Oberwolfach, Germany, in 1969, I was honored by being elected to the Presidency of the Society, following Dr. J. G. Whitrow, our fIrst (...) President. My mandate was to organize a Second Conference, consistent with the aim of the Society, which is the holding of interdisciplinary conferences for the presentation and discussion of papers on various as pects of time. Several participants expressed to me their wish to have a second conference held in Japan so as to emphasize the international and intercultural dedication of this Society. Dr. Fraser carefully evaluated this and many other suggestions, weighed the possible conference sites and our chances of raising the necessary funds to convene a meeting at such sites, and concurred with my conclusions that we should go ahead with the plans for a Japanese meeting. For the difficult and complicated task of raising funds and organizing a conference in Japan, I had to select and rely heavily on somebody both capable and reliable and also living in Japan. Thus, I asked the Reverend Michael Mutsuo Yanase, S. J. (shrink)

The papers in this volume reflect much of the current unease of a world that perceives itself once more at the edge of chaos. The authors present different vistas of that experience and their inherent dialectic, expressed in numerous and ceaseless conflicts between ordering and disordering processes. They can be read as comments on the ongoing processes that lead toward greater complexity.

In ‘The nature of moral judgments and the extent of the moral domain’, Fraser criticises findings by Kelly et al. that speak against the moral/conventional distinction, arguing that the experiment was confounded. First, we note that the results of that experiment held up when confounds were removed . Second, and more importantly, we argue that attempts to prove the existence of a M/C distinction are systematically confounded. In contrast to Fraser, we refer to data that support our view. (...) We highlight the implications for the moral/conventional theory. (shrink)

"... Fraser and Bartky have brought the encounter between U.S. and French feminism to a new level of seriousness." —Ethics In the last decade, elements of French feminist discourse have permeated and transformed the larger feminist culture in the United States. This volume is the first sustained attempt to revalue French feminism and answer the question: What has been gained and what has been lost as a result of this intercultural encounter? Interviews with Simone de Beauvoir open the book; (...) essays by French feminists Sarah Kofman and Luce Irigaray follow; the North American contributors are Judith Butler, Nancy Fraser, Diana J. Fuss, Nancy J. Holland, Eleanor H. Kuykendall, Dorothy Leland, Diana T. Meyers, Andrea Nye, and Margaret A. Simons. (shrink)

"Only a wayfarer born under unruly stars would attempt to put into practice in our epoch of proliferating knowledge the Heraclitean dictum that `men who love wisdom must be inquirers into very many things indeed.'" Thus begins this remarkable interdisciplinary study of time by a master of the subject. And while developing a theory of "time as conflict," J. T. Fraser does offer "many things indeed"--an enormous range of ideas about matter, life, death, evolution, and value.

In this review I take to task the related views of E.J. Lowe, John Heil and Peter Simons according to which relations don't exist because they're dispensable qua truth-makers. I argue that this view is methodologically unstable because we also have reason to believe that relations exist because our best mathematical and scientific theories say so, i.e. quantify over them.

One of the more recalcitrant issues in the philosophy of time concerns the question of temporal asymmetry. Some theorists, many of them, like Einstein, physicists, believe that time is fundamentally reversible. According to this view, the physical universe is indifferent to the direction of time; consequently, something like an arrow of time is held to be a human subjective imposition on an otherwise temporally isotropic world. Another position, held by Alfred North Whitehead and contemporary process philosophers, maintains that temporal asymmetry (...) is a primitive condition of the universe, and that therefore even the most basic physical processes, such as those occurring at the subatomic level, display a distinct temporal direction. Finally, the philosopher of time J.T. Fraser (1978) claims that temporal asymmetry is an emergent feature of the universe, appearing for the first time with biogenesis. According to Fraser, with the emergence of life comes a present, or “now”, a temporal dimension whose absence in more primitive levels of cosmic evolution prohibits the attribution of an arrow of time to any pre-biotic entity. (shrink)

Provides an accessible account of the changing world of archaeological theory. It charts the emergence of the new emphasis on relations as well as engaging with current theoretical trends and the thinkers archaeologists regularly employ. This book will be an essential guide to cutting-edge theory for students and for professionals wishing to reacquaint themselves with this field. Oliver J.T. Harris is lecturer in archaeology in the School of Archaeology & Ancient History, University of Leicester. Craig N. Cipolla is lecturer in (...) historical archaeology in the School of Archaeology & Ancient History, University of Leicester"--Provided by publisher. (shrink)

BackgroundECMO is a particularly scarce resource during the COVID-19 pandemic. Its allocation involves ethical considerations that may be different to usual times. There is limited pre-pandemic literature on the ethical factors that ECMO physicians consider during ECMO allocation. During the pandemic, there has been relatively little professional guidance specifically relating to ethics and ECMO allocation; although there has been active ethical debate about allocation of other critical care resources. We report the results of a small international exploratory survey of ECMO (...) clinicians’ views on different patient factors in ECMO decision-making prior to and during the COVID-19 pandemic. We then outline current ethical decision procedures and recommendations for rationing life-sustaining treatment during the COVID-19 pandemic, and examine the extent to which current guidelines for ECMO allocation (and reported practice) adhere to these ethical guidelines and recommendations.MethodsAn online survey was performed with responses recorded between mid May and mid August 2020. Participants (n = 48) were sourced from the ECMOCard study group—an international group of experts (n = 120) taking part in a prospective international study of ECMO and intensive care for patients during the COVID-19 pandemic. The survey compared the extent to which certain ethical factors involved in ECMO resource allocation were considered prior to and during the pandemic.ResultsWhen initiating ECMO during the pandemic, compared to usual times, participants reported giving more ethical weight to the benefit of ECMO to other patients not yet admitted as opposed to those already receiving ECMO, (p < 0.001). If a full unit were referred a good candidate for ECMO, participants were more likely during the pandemic to consider discontinuing ECMO from a current patient with low chance of survival (53% during pandemic vs. 33% prior p = 0.002). If the clinical team recommends that ECMO should cease, but family do not agree, the majority of participants indicated that they would continue treatment, both in usual circumstances (67%) and during the pandemic (56%).ConclusionsWe found differences during the COVID-19 pandemic in prioritisation of several ethical factors in the context of ECMO allocation. The ethical principles prioritised by survey participants were largely consistent with ECMO allocation guidelines, current ethical decision procedures and recommendations for allocation of life-sustaining treatment during the COVID-19 pandemic. (shrink)

What are words? What makes two token words tokens of the same word-type? Are words abstract entities, or are they (merely) collections of tokens? The ontology of words tries to provide answers to these, and related questions. This article provides an overview of some of the most prominent views proposed in the literature, with a particular focus on the debate between type-realist, nominalist, and eliminativist ontologies of words.

It has been a common assumption that words are substances that instantiate or have properties. In this paper, I question the assumption that our ontology of words requires posting substances by outlining a bundle theory of words, wherein words are bundles of various sorts of properties (such as semantic, phonetic, orthographic, and grammatical properties). I argue that this view can better account for certain phenomena than substance theories, is ontologically more parsimonious, and coheres with claims in linguistics.

It has been widely argued that words are analogous to species such that words, like species, are natural kinds. In this paper, I consider the metaphysics of word-kinds. After arguing against an essentialist approach, I argue that word-kinds are homeostatic property clusters, in line with the dominant approach to other biological and psychological kinds.

ABSTRACT The idea that two words can be instances of the same word is a central intuition in our conception of language. This fact underlies many of the claims that we make about how we communicate, and how we understand each other. Given this, irrespective of what we think words are, it is common to think that any putative ontology of words, must be able to explain this feature of language. That is, we need to provide criteria of identity for (...) word-types which allow us to individuate words such that it can be the case that two particular word-instances are instances of the same word-type. One solution, recently further developed by Irmak, holds that words are individuated by their history. In this paper, I argue that this view either fails to account for our intuitions about word identity, or is too vague to be a plausible answer to the problem of word individuation. (shrink)

The role of probability is one of the most contested issues in the interpretation of contemporary physics. In this paper, I’ll be reevaluating some widely held assumptions about where and how probabilities arise. Larry Sklar voices the conventional wisdom about probability in classical physics in a piece in the Stanford Online Encyclopedia of Philosophy, when he writes that “Statistical mechanics was the first foundational physical theory in which probabilistic concepts and probabilistic explanation played a fundamental role.” And the conventional wisdom (...) about quantum probabilities is that they are basic, not reducible to the types of probabilities we see in statistical mechanics. In the first section of this paper, I’ll argue that in fact classical physics was steeped in probability long before statistical mechanics came on the scene, specifically, that an objective measure over phase space is an indispensable component of any informative physical theory. In the next section, I’ll argue that this objective measure is the fundamental form of physical probability and that quantum probabilities can be defined in terms of it. In the last, I’ll raise some questions about the metaphysical status of the fundamental measure. (shrink)

The natural name theory, recently discussed by Johnson (2018), is proposed as an explanation of pure quotation where the quoted term(s) refers to a linguistic object such as in the sentence ‘In the above, ‘bank’ is ambiguous’. After outlining the theory, I raise a problem for the natural name theory. I argue that positing a resemblance relation between the name and the linguistic object it names does not allow us to rule out cases where the natural name fails to resemble (...) the linguistic object it names. I argue that to avoid this problem, we can combine the natural name theory with a type-realist metaphysics of language, and hold that the name is natural because the name is an instance of the kind that it names. I conclude by reflecting on the importance of the metaphysics of language for questions in the philosophy of language. (shrink)

Minimally, metaphysical realists hold that there exist some mind-independent entities. Metaphysical realists also hold that we can speak meaningfully or truthfully about mind-independent entities. Those who reject metaphysical realism deny one or more of these commitments. This Element aims to introduce the reader to the core commitments of metaphysical realism and to illustrate how these commitments have changed over time by surveying some of the main families of views that realism has been contrasted with: such as scepticism, idealism, and anti-realism.

This paper addresses several questions related to the nature, production, and use of animal-human (a-h) chimeras. At the heart of the issue is whether certain types of a-h chimeras should be brought into existence, and, if they are, how we should treat such creatures. In our current research environment, we recognize a dichotomy between research involving nonhuman animal subjects and research involving human subjects, and the classification of a research protocol into one of these categories will trigger different ethical standards (...) as to the moral permissibility of the research in question. Are a-h chimeras entitled to the more restrictive and protective ethical standards applied to human research subjects? We elucidate an Aristotelian-Thomistic metaphysical framework in which to argue how such chimeras ought to be defined ontologically. We then examine when the creation of, and experimentation upon, certain types of a-h chimeras may be morally permissible. (shrink)

Although the metaphysics of words remains a relatively understudied domain, one of the more discussed topics has been the question of how to account for the apparent sameness of words. Put one way, the question concerns what it is that makes two word- instances (or tokens) instances of the same word. In this paper, I argue that the existing solutions to the problems all fail as they take the problem of sameness of word to be a problem about how one (...) object relates to another. I propose an alternative solution to the problem of sameness of word which is instead focused on the intrinsic nature of the properties possessed by words. The result is a more thoroughgoing version of nominalism than is currently defended in the literature. (shrink)

Art history on the edge : iconology, media, and visual culture -- Four fundamental concepts of image science -- Image science -- Image X text -- Realism and the digital image -- Migrating images : totemism, fetishism, idolatry -- The future of the image : Rancière's road not taken -- World pictures : globalization and visual culture -- Media aesthetics -- There are no visual media -- Back to the drawing board : architecture, sculpture, and the digital image -- Foundational (...) sites and occupied spaces -- Border wars : translation and convergence in politics and media -- Art X environment -- The historical uncanny : phantoms, doubles, and repetition in the war on terror -- The spectacle today : a response to retort -- Coda : for a sweet science of images. (shrink)