At the risk of proving myself such a caviller, I want to ask a question which I have seldom heard raised, and which I have never seen discussed in anything that I have read about Berkeley. If I am right, it poses a problem for his immaterialism, not only different, but coming from a different direction, from those objections that are commonly levelled against him. If I am wrong, it will show how right Berkeley was to stress the difficulty of (...) using for one purpose our language which has become fashioned for another. At least, I hope that I shall not fail to be the ‘fair and ingenuous reader’for whom he asked. (shrink)

A. D. M. Walker; III*—Gratefulness and Gratitude, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 81, Issue 1, 1 June 1981, Pages 39–56, https://doi.org/10.1093.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss and to relate to each other two topics: the admissibility of ignorance and mistake of fact as defences against negligence in crime; and the inadmissibility of ignorance and mistake of law as defences against criminal charges. I am in not concerned at all with torts negligence, only with criminal offences which can be committed negligently, where negligence suffices for liability, as in the law of homicide. This produces an untidy classification of elements, (...) one or other of which is needed to provide the required mens rea : intention, knowledge, recklessness and negligence. It is untidy, because the last does not belong on the same list as the other three, each of which can appropriately be called a state of mind in what we might say to be a positive sense, for each of them includes some degree of awareness of and/or attitude to relevant facts. If negligence is to be called a state of mind, it is so in a very stretched and negative way: to be told that a person was not attending to, thinking of or noticing something that he should have been is to be given some information, of a negative sort, about his state of mind, but it tells us very little, for it eliminates only one of an unlimited range of states of mind. His not attending, noticing, etc., is equally compatible with his daydreaming and with his concentrating hard on something else. If negligence requires inadvertence, as is commonly maintained, then there was a state of mind which the agent should have been in but was not; if, as I would argue, it does not require inadvertence, then there was a state of mind which the agent should have been in, and maybe he was not in it, maybe he was in it. would not require it; the definition runs, ‘a person is negligent if he fails to exercise such care, skill or foresight as a reasonable man in his situation would exercise’. However, that is only a proposal; at present advertent negligence is rare in criminal law, although common in torts.) On this view, the questions are whether his performance fell below scratch, what are to be the excusing conditions for such a performance, and if the answer to is yes, whether his performance was covered by the excusing conditions. (shrink)

Linguistics; Arab languages; teaching and learning.

The paper examines a single, apparently simple argument for the existence of incompatibilities between the virtues as traits of character. This argument appeals not to empirical truths about human psychology or human nature but to the possibility of conflict between the exercise of different virtues in action. There are, for example, situations in which we can exercise the virtue of truthfulness only at the expense of not exercising the virtue of tact, as when we are asked a question to which (...) the straightforward answer will pain our questioner. The person who in these situations would give a straightforward answer possesses the virtue of truthfulness to a higher degree than the person who would respond more evasively, whereas the latter person possesses the virtue of tact to a higher degree than the former. But since the two responses are mutually exclusive, it follows that the degree to which we possess the virtue of truthfulness must, at least in some measure, correlate inversely with the degree to which we possess the virtue of tact. And similarly for many other pairs of virtues. My paper focusses on the two cardinal assumptions of this argument, viz., (i) that sometimes the exercise of one virtue can conflict with the exercise of another, and (ii) that the degree to which a person possesses a virtue correlates directly with the extent of its exercise, and defends both assumptions against a variety of objections which allege that, in different ways, they are insensitive to the complexity of the virtues. (shrink)

The author has recently shown that a mathematical question regarding the fundamental constituents of hardrons cannot be resolved unless the classical axioms of nonfinite mathematics are revised in such a way as to produce a new theory of particle motion in continuous space-time. Under this new theory, the instantaneous position of a moving object has a magnitude that is increasing as the object's velocity. The purpose of this paper is to show that, quite apart from the question of Cantorian axiomatics, (...) the new theory of motion is more consistent with what physicists really believe than the traditional theory of motion. (shrink)

In this paper I want to examine a view of the Darwinian theory of evolution which was put forward fairly recently by A. R. Manser. His approach is of interest not only in itself, but also because it may be expanded to raise some fundamental questions about the nature of the science of biology in general. I shall not consider these further implications here, but shall concentrate on an examination of his thesis in the context in which it is raised. (...) My paper falls into two sections. In the first I shall state Manser's thesis and some of the arguments with which he supports it, and shall try to show how a series of objections raised by A. G. N. Flew and K. Connolly may be answered. In the second I shall offer on my own account a positive argument to provide a possible basis for his point of view, with the aim of indicating why the theory should be of the kind he suggests, and what form the study of evolution must take. (shrink)

The authors attempt to speculatively reconstruct the concept of the “So­viet computer game”. They propose to consider gaming practices associ­ated with computers as a derivative of the accepted ideological guidelines that accompany the Soviet project of machine modernization. Within this framework, the concept of the Soviet computer game appears as an unre­alized historical alternative to the normative game design that has devel­oped in countries with market economies. Despite the industry — or the electronic entertainment market — not having had the (...) time to be properly established in the USSR, there were a number of discursive attitudes re­garding the game as such, and the gaming function of computing devices in particular. Even early Soviet pedagogical theories assumed that “playing like a Soviet” involves performing activities structurally similar to labor, where the player becomes part of production. Later, cybernetic discourse, through game theory, indicated the possibility of formalizing any prag­matic activity as a game model; with the advancement of programming, the pragmatics of digital gaming as a way of educating and solving utili­tarian tasks was developed. Based on the memoir archive of Soviet cyber­netics, and publications in the late-Soviet press, the authors demonstrate that the Soviet computer game was not seen an entertainment product, but a representative model for solving problems in an algorithmic form. Thus, the article is not about specific games that could be called Soviet, but about the logic that guided and set the tone for the interpretation of certain computer-game phenomena in the USSR. (shrink)