In this new edition, Arthur Fine looks at Einstein's philosophy of science and develops his own views on realism. A new Afterword discusses the reaction to Fine's own theory. "What really led Einstein . . . to renounce the new quantum order? For those interested in this question, this book is compulsory reading."--Harvey R. Brown, American Journal of Physics "Fine has successfully combined a historical account of Einstein's philosophical views on quantum mechanics and a discussion of some of the (...) philosophical problems associated with the interpretation of quantum theory with a discussion of some of the contemporary questions concerning realism and antirealism. . . . Clear, thoughtful, [and] well-written."--Allan Franklin, Annals of Science "Attempts, from Einstein's published works and unpublished correspondence, to piece together a coherent picture of 'Einstein realism.' Especially illuminating are the letters between Einstein and fellow realist Schrodinger, as the latter was composing his famous 'Schrodinger-Cat' paper."--Nick Herbert, New Scientist "Beautifully clear. . . . Fine's analysis is penetrating, his own results original and important. . . . The book is a splendid combination of new ways to think about quantum mechanics, about realism, and about Einstein's views of both."--Nancy Cartwright, Isis. (shrink)

I am grateful to Donald Ainslie, Lisa Austin, Michael Blake, Abraham Drassinower, David Dyzenhaus, George Fletcher, Robert Gibbs, Louis-Philippe Hodgson, Sari Kisilevsky, Dennis Klimchuk, Christopher Morris, Scott Shapiro, Horacio Spector, Sergio Tenenbaum, Malcolm Thorburn, Ernest Weinrib, Karen Weisman, and the Editors of Philosophy & Public Affairs for comments, and audiences in the UCLA Philosophy Department and Columbia Law School for their questions.

Dilation occurs when an interval probability estimate of some event E is properly included in the interval probability estimate of E conditional on every event F of some partition, which means that one’s initial estimate of E becomes less precise no matter how an experiment turns out. Critics maintain that dilation is a pathological feature of imprecise probability models, while others have thought the problem is with Bayesian updating. However, two points are often overlooked: (1) knowing that E is stochastically (...) independent of F (for all F in a partition of the underlying state space) is sufficient to avoid dilation, but (2) stochastic independence is not the only independence concept at play within imprecise probability models. In this paper we give a simple characterization of dilation formulated in terms of deviation from stochastic independence, propose a measure of dilation, and distinguish between proper and improper dilation. Through this we revisit the most sensational examples of dilation, which play up independence between dilator and dilatee, and find the sensationalism undermined by either fallacious reasoning with imprecise probabilities or improperly constructed imprecise probability models. (shrink)

"The past two decades have seen renewed scholarly and popular interest in the law and morality of war. Positions that originated in the late Middle Ages through the 17th century have received more sophisticated philosophical elaboration. Although many contemporary writers draw on ideas that figure prominently in Kant's moral philosophy, his explicit discussions of war have not been brought into their proper place within these discussions and debates. Kant argues that a special morality governs the permissible use of force because (...) of wars distinctive immorality. He characterizes war as barbaric, because in war might makes right - which side prevails does not depend on who is in the right. The very thing that makes war wrongful also provides the appropriate standard for evaluating the conduct of war, and the only basis for law governing war"--. (shrink)

Over a decade ago, Arthur Danto announced that art ended in the sixties. Ever since this declaration, he has been at the forefront of a radical critique of the nature of art in our time. After the End of Art presents Danto's first full-scale reformulation of his original insight, showing how, with the eclipse of abstract expressionism, art has deviated irrevocably from the narrative course that Vasari helped define for it in the Renaissance. Moreover, he leads the way to (...) a new type of criticism that can help us understand art in a posthistorical age where, for example, an artist can produce a work in the style of Rembrandt to create a visual pun, and where traditional theories cannot explain the difference between Andy Warhol's Brillo Box and the product found in the grocery store. Here we are engaged in a series of insightful and entertaining conversations on the most relevant aesthetic and philosophical issues of art, conducted by an especially acute observer of the art scene today.Originally delivered as the prestigious Mellon Lectures on the Fine Arts, these writings cover art history, pop art, "people's art," the future role of museums, and the critical contributions of Clement Greenberg--who helped make sense of modernism for viewers over two generations ago through an aesthetics-based criticism. Tracing art history from a mimetic tradition through the modern era of manifestos, Danto shows that it wasn't until the invention of Pop art that the historical understanding of the means and ends of art was nullified. Even modernist art, which tried to break with the past by questioning the ways of producing art, hinged on a narrative.Traditional notions of aesthetics can no longer apply to contemporary art, argues Danto. Instead he focuses on a philosophy of art criticism that can deal with perhaps the most perplexing feature of contemporary art: that everything is possible. (shrink)

The repudiation of propositions as “obscure entities” which is prevalent among logicians and philosophers of “nominalistic” persuasion, is frequently justified by pointing out that no agreement seems ever to have been reached about the identity-condition of propositions. And if we cannot specify, so they argue, under what conditions two sentences express the same proposition, then we use the word “proposition” without any clear meaning. Quine, for example, feels far less uneasy about quantification over class-variables than about quantification over attribute-variables and (...) propositional variables, because there is a clear criterion for deciding whether we are dealing with two classes or with only one class referred to by different predicates: two classes are identical if they have the same membership. And such a criterion of identity is alleged to be lacking for intensions. (shrink)

Ripstein's lectures, which constitute the central texts of this book, focus on the two bodies of rules governing war: the jus ad bellum, which regulates resort to armed force, and the jus in bello, which sets forth rules governing the conduct of armed force and applies equally to all parties. The lectures argue that both sets of rules constitute prohibitions rather than permissions, and that recognizing them as distinctive prohibitions can reconcile the seeming tension between them. By understanding that the (...) central wrong of war is that war is the condition which force decides, Ripstein contends that the law and morality of war are in fact aligned; the rules governing the conduct of hostilities must apply equally to parties in the right and parties in the wrong in an armed conflict, because the prohibitions outlined in the rules governing war are prohibitions that restrain war. Ripstein's method of analysis and the substantive argument he puts forward offer an opportunity for rigorous critical engagement in subsequent essays by commentators Hathaway, Kutz, and McMahan, followed by a response from Ripstein. (shrink)

1m Studienjahr 1953/54 hielt ich an der Universitat Wien als Gast­ professor Vorlesungen und Seminare uber die gegenwartige analytische Philosophie in USA und England. Auf Grund einer Einladung durch die philosophische Fakultat, die hauptsachlich der Initiative von em. o. o. Professor Dr. VICTOR KRAFT zu verdanken war, wurde mir zu diesem Zweck yom amerikanischen State Department ein "Fulbright"­ Stipendium gewahrt. Das vorliegende Buch entsprang dieser Tatigkeit. Es ware jedoch ohne die sachverstandige und enthusiastische Mitarbeit von Dr. PAUL FEYERABEND, dem ich (...) hiermit meinen herzlichen Dank aussprechen will, kaum in so kurzer Zeit zustandegekommen. Fragmente eines Vorlesungsmanuskriptes lagen nur fUr die ersten drei Kapitel vor. Dr. FEYERABEND verfertigte die fehlenden Partien ex post facto auf Grund der N otizen, die er sich, als auBergewohnlich aktiver "Horer", bei den Vorlesungen und Seminaren machte. Ich unterzog sein Manuskript einer grundlichen Revision, hier und dort auch Erweiterungen anbringend; der groBte Teil des Buches entstand auf diese Weise. Auch die anregenden Diskussionen mit Dr. FEYERABEND, innerhalb und auBerhalb der Vor­ lesungen und Seminare, waren ein betrachtlicher Ansporn zum Schreiben dieses Buches. (shrink)

This book examines responsibility and luck as these issues arise in tort law, criminal law, and distributive justice. The central question is: whose bad luck is a particular piece of misfortune? Arthur Ripstein argues that there is a general set of principles to be found that clarifies responsibility in those cases where luck is most obviously an issue: accidents, mistakes, emergencies, and failed attempts at crime. In revealing how the problems that arise in tort and criminal law as well (...) as distributive justice invite structurally parallel solutions, the author also shows the deep connection between individual responsibility and social equality. This is a challenging and provocative book that will be of special interest to moral and political philosophers, legal theorists, and political scientists. (shrink)

Historian Arthur Herman traces the roots of declinism and shows how major thinkers, past and present, have contributed to its development as a coherent ideology of cultural pessimism. From Nazism to the Sixties counterculture, from Britain's Fabian socialists to America's multiculturalists, and from Dracula and Freud to Robert Bly and Madonna, this work examines the idea of decline in Western history and sets out to explain how the conviction of civilization's inevitable end has become a fixed part of the (...) modern Western imagination. Through a series of biographical portraits spanning the 19th and 20th centuries, the author traces the roots of declinism and aims to show how major thinkers of the past and present, including Nietzsche, DuBois, Sartre, and Foucault, have contributed to its development as a coherent ideology of cultural pessimism. (shrink)

Continuous first-order logic has found interest among model theorists who wish to extend the classical analysis of “algebraic” structures to various natural classes of complete metric structures. With research in continuous first-order logic preoccupied with studying the model theory of this framework, we find a natural question calls for attention. Is there an interesting set of axioms yielding a completeness result?The primary purpose of this article is to show that a certain, interesting set of axioms does indeed yield a completeness (...) result for continuous first-order logic. In particular, we show that in continuous first-order logic a set of formulae is satisfiable if it is consistent. From this result it follows that continuous first-order logic also satisfies an approximated form of strong completeness, whereby Σ⊨φ only if Σ⊢φ∸ 2-n for all n < ω. This approximated form of strong completeness asserts that if Σ⊨φ, then proofs from Σ, being finite, can provide arbitrarily better approximations of the truth of φ.Additionally, we consider a different kind of question traditionally arising in model theory—that of decidability. When is the set of all consequences of a theory recursive? Say that a complete theory T is decidable if for every sentence φ, the value φT is a recursive real, and moreover, uniformly computable from φ. If T is incomplete, we say it is decidable if for every sentence φ the real number φT∘ is uniformly recursive from φ, where φT∘is the maximal value of φ consistent with T. As in classical first-order logic, it follows from the completeness theorem of continuous first-order logic that if a complete theory admits a recursive axiomatization then it is decidable. (shrink)

The field of medical rehabilitation is relatively new.... Until recently, the ethical problems of this new field were neglected. There seemed to be more pressing concerns as rehabilitation medicine struggled to establish itself, sometimes in the face of considerable skepticism or hostility. There also seemed no pressing moral questions of the kind and intensity to be encountered, say, in high-technology acute care medicine or genetic engineering.... Those in biomedical ethics could and did easily overlook the quiet, less obtrusive issues of (...) rehabilitation.... The Hastings Center set out in 1985 to rectify that situation.... To explore the issues, the Center assembled a group of practitioners in the field, Hastings Center staff members, and individuals experienced in other areas of medical ethics.... The report that follows was written by Arthur Caplan and Daniel Callahan, assisted by Dr. Janet Haas of the Moss Rehabilitation Hospital in Philadelphia... (shrink)

There is a wide variety of cases of alienation, including (a) when an agent is alienated from her own motivational states and (b) deviant causal cases when an agent's motivational states cause her intended actions but via a deviant causal pathway. Reflecting on the variety of kinds of alienation reveals that action explanation still needs to account for the positive role that agents play in non-alienated actions in general. To fill this gap, this paper identifies a sui generis but crucial (...) notion of control, what I call “synchronic executive control,” where agents act on their reasons, which must be distinguished from (a) endorsing one's reasons as reasonable or as the reasons for action (from the autonomy literature), and (b) other, diachronic notions of executive control such as competence, skills-based control, planning-based control, and counterfactual control generally (from especially the deviant causation literature). The presence of such executive control is crucial for explaining the role of agents in non-alienated actions, and its absence explains the lack of agency in alienation cases. The result is the identification of a relationship agents have with their reasons which unifies the variety of non-alienated actions in a novel way. (shrink)

In one of the few widely discussed passages in the Doctrine of Right, Kant makes the surprising claim that a shipwrecked sailor who dislodges another from a plank that will support only one of them is "culpable, but not punishable." Many commentators regard this passage as a sort of smoking gun that shows that, in extremis, Kant resorts to the very sort of empirical and consequentialist reasoning that he claims to do without.2 My aim in this paper is to defend (...) his analysis, by showing both that it can be generalized, and that it provides a satisfying account of the normative boundary between justification and excuse in the criminal law. After explaining Kant ’s remark in light of the context in which he makes it, my main strategy of defense will be to show how it applies not only to the specific example Kant considers, but also to cases in which a person responds to danger by damaging property, and those in which a person whose own life is not in danger breaks the law to save the life of another. I will also use his account to illustrate the difficulties with the leading alternatives. (shrink)

Features of threatening cues and the associated context influence the perceived imminence of threat and the defensive responses evoked. To provide additional knowledge about how the directionality of a threat (i.e. directed-towards or away from the viewer) might impact defensive responses in humans, participants were shown pictures of a man carrying a gun (threat) or nonlethal object (neutral) directed-away from or towards the participant. Cardiac and electrodermal responses were collected. Compared to neutral images, threatening images depicting a gun directed-towards the (...) participant induced sustained bradycardia and an increased electrodermal response, interpreted as immobility under attack. This defensive immobility reaction is evoked by high perceived threat and inescapable situations and indicates intense action preparation. Pictures of guns directed-away from the participant induced shorter bradycardia and no significant modulation of the electrodermal response compared to neutral pictures, which might be consistent with the perception of a less threatening situation. The results show that the directionality of threat stimuli is a key factor that prompts different patterns of defensive responses. (shrink)

I am grateful to Micah Gläser, Ryan Liss, and Marcela Prieto Rudolphy for their generous, careful, and provocative engagements with my work. Each of them advances the discussion by proposing modifi...

We explore the extent to which ancient Greek authors formulated concepts that approximate or encompass our modern notions of precision and accuracy. First, we focus on estimates and measurements of geographic features, astronomical times and positions, and weight. These raise further questions about whether the quantities reported were measured, estimated, or rounded. While ancient sources discuss the use of instruments, it is not always clear that the aim was to achieve what we would today regard as ‘precision’. Next, we briefly (...) consider round numbers, observing that they could carry symbolic meaning, while unrounded numbers could give an impression of hard-won achievement. Finally, we examine uses of the word akribeia. This is often translated as ‘precision’ or ‘exactness’, and Greek writers sometimes used akribeia to denote an ideal for their inquiries. A brief look at its uses by a number of Greek writers will on the one hand show the mismatch with our term ‘precision’, and on the other hand throw some light on the aims of Greek investigators. (shrink)

Ronald Dworkin occupies a distinctive place in both public life and philosophy. In public life, he is a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books and other widely read journals. In philosophy, he has written important and influential works on many of the most prominent issues in legal and political philosophy. In both cases, his interventions have in part shaped the debates he joined. His opposition to Robert Bork's nomination for the United States Supreme Court gave new centrality (...) to debates about the public role of judges and the role of original intent in constitutional interpretation. His writings in legal philosophy have reoriented the modern debate about legal positivism and natural law. In political philosophy, he has shaped the ways in which people debate the nature of equality and has reframed debates about the sanctity of life. (shrink)

If scientists can successfully clone sheep, will humans be next? Today's headlines read like a science fiction novel! Due Consideration takes a poignant look at the rapidly changing field of biomedicine and the consequences it will have on our lives. Arthur Caplan, one of this nation's leading bioethicists, explores these issues and analyzes moral questions including: * Will we retain our essential humanity if we modify our biological blueprint? * Would it be irresponsible to procreate without a thorough genetic (...) examination? * Who will decide if physical traits like short stature and baldness are considered diseases? * Can biomedicine make our lives better? You'll also learn about the most current and controversial topics such as: * Cloning, abortion and assisted suicide. * Genetically engineering a human to be immune from infectious diseases. * The ability to "design" our children from head to toe. * Diagnosing and treating illnesses during fetal development. * Programs to prevent the transmission of HIV. No other book on the market today combines this analytic clarity with the latest from medical journals and media headlines. Now, you can decide for yourself what the future ought to hold in store. (shrink)

Criticism and sarcasm are interspersed with description and analysis throughout Marx's work. Most of the criticism is aimed at one or another side of a single target: what Marx sees as capitalism's pretensions of freedom, equality, and prosperity in the face of exploitation and recurrent crises. But the remarks on commodity fetishism in the first volume of Capital seem to be directed at a different target. Here Marx tells us that a commodity is ‘a queer thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties (...) and theological niceties.’ But instead of going on to reveal the nature of commodites-the task that occupies him for the preceding 30 and subsequent 700 pages-Marx takes the opportunity to explore their ‘mystical’ character. The passage repays careful consideration. It is one of the few places in his mature writings in which Marx returns to the tone of his youthful works. It is also the passage in which commentators have claimed to find grounds for attributing a doctrine of ‘false consciousness’ to Marx. (shrink)

The lead essay by Arthur Danto "addresses the possibility that art as it has been enshrined in the museums, galleries, and other canonizing institutions of modern culture has reached an end, that it has nothing more to do or say." The other essays in the book are reactions to the lead essay.

Last year marked the fiftieth anniversary of the inauguration of Brazil’s capital Brasilia. Designed by architects Lúcio Costa and Oscar Niemeyer, it has since become one of the most famous and widely studied urban planning projects. Niemeyer’s cathedral, Catedral Metropolitana Nossa Senhora Aparecida; his building for the national parliament, the Congresso Nacional; and the city’s 707-foot television tower have become icons of twentieth-century architecture. The entire city, marked by its cross-shaped layout and vast open spaces, was named a UNESO World (...) Heritage site in 1987. René Burri, an internationally celebrated Swiss-born photographer and member of the legendary Magnum agency, visited the city for the first time on a long journey around South America in 1958, when most of Brasilia was a vast building site. He returned many times over more than thirty years, documenting the growth and development of this urban utopia. Besides documenting the buildings in various stages of completion, Burri took portraits of Niemeyer and his workers and photographed Brasilia’s street scenes and people: workers with their tools, machinery and building materials, pedestrians on the newly finished streets and squares, and aerial views from the air of the city’s first slums abutting brand-new blocks of residential buildings. His images capture the strong sense of a new era and a vibrant atmosphere of hard work and strain; they reflect the huge dimensions of the landscape and the great scale of this project and its ambition to design and build a new capital—and fill it with life. Complete with an essay by eminent architect and scholar of architectural history Arthur Rüegg, René Burri. Brasilia marks the city’s fiftieth anniversary and allows readers to look at an extraordinary city through the eyes of an exceptional photographer. (shrink)

Originally published in 1933, this book presents the content of the Alfred Marshall Lectures for that year, which were delivered by Sir Arthur Salter at Cambridge University. The text sets out Salter's vision regarding the fundamental components of an ordered society. This book will be of value to anyone with an interest in political philosophy and the nature of statehood.

BackgroundAlthough values have increasingly received attention in psychiatric literature over the last three decades, their role has been only partially acknowledged in psychiatric classification endeavors. The review process of the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders received harsh criticism, and was even considered secretive by some authors. Also, it lacked an official discussion of values at play. In this perspective paper we briefly discuss the interplay of some values in the scientific and non-scientific debate around (...) one of the most debated DSM-5 category proposals, the Attenuated Psychosis Syndrome. Then, we point out some ethical consequences of a facts-plus-values perspective in psychiatric classification.DiscussionDifferent stakeholders participated in the APS-debate and for analytical purposes we divided them into four groups: researchers in the field of high-risk mental states; the DSM-5 Psychotic Disorders Work Group; patient, carers and advocacy groups; and external stakeholders, not related to the previous groups, but which also publicly expressed their opinions about APS inclusion in DSM-5. We found that each group differently stressed the role of values we examined in the APS-debate. These values were ethical, but also epistemic, political, economic and ontological. The prominence given to some values, and the lack of discussion about others, generated divergent positions among stakeholders in the debate.SummaryAs exemplified by the APS discussion, although medicine is primarily an ethical endeavor, values of different kinds that take part in it also shape to a large extent the profession. Thus, it may be strategic to openly discuss values at play in the elaboration of diagnostic tools and classificatory systems. This task, more than scientifically or politically significant, is ethically important. (shrink)

Although values have increasingly received attention in psychiatric literature over the last three decades, their role has been only partially acknowledged in psychiatric classification endeavors. The review p..

Most areas of the cognitive and social sciences assume that knowledge representations are constructed and used during communication and that much of its content is social. Those of us who build computer models of comprehension and conversation are forced to be explicit about the nature of these knowledge representations and affiliated processes. There are some conditions when knowledge is not sufficiently social, and other conditions when knowledge is overly grounded in social mechanisms. The argument is advanced that constraints, coherence, and (...) precision are very much at the heart of an explanation of the nature and amount of social knowledge. Asocial content reigns supreme when the referential world knowledge is highly constrained, coherently structured, and precisely specified. The social context of knowledge construction becomes progressively more influential to the extent to that world knowledge is vague, open-ended, imprecise, underspecified, and fragmentary. (shrink)

Let X be a set, and let $\hat{X} = \bigcup^\infty_{n = 0} X_n$ be the superstructure of X, where X 0 = X and X n + 1 = X n ∪ P(X n ) (P(X) is the power set of X) for n ∈ ω. The set X is called a flat set if and only if $X \neq \varnothing.\varnothing \not\in X.x \cap \hat X = \varnothing$ for each x ∈ X, and $x \cap \hat{y} = \varnothing$ for x.y (...) ∈ X such that x ≠ y, where $\hat{y} = \bigcup^\infty_{n = 0} y_n$ is the superstructure of y. In this article, it is shown that there exists a bijection of any nonempty set onto a flat set. Also, if W̃ is an ultrapower of X̂ (generated by any infinite set I and any nonprincipal ultrafilter on I), it is shown that W̃ is a nonstandard model of X: i.e., the Transfer Principle holds for X̂ and W̃, if X is a flat set. Indeed, it is obvious that W̃ is not a nonstandard model of X when X is an infinite ordinal number. The construction of flat sets only requires the ZF axioms of set theory. Therefore, the assumption that X is a set of individuals (i.e., $x \neq \varnothing$ and a ∈ x does not hold for x ∈ X and for any element a) is not needed for W̃ to be a nonstandard model of X. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Innate Right Private Right Coercion From Private Right to Public Right Public Right Crime and the Right to Punish Conclusion Bibliography.

This review essay examines Benbaji and Statman's _War by Agreemen__t_. It raises two challenges to their contractarian account of war, which seeks to show that considerations of mutual advantage can generate novel permissions. First, if such a robust justification for participation in unjust wars is available, it is not clear that any kind of agreement between states is even required; if a state can make otherwise unjustified killings permissible, it would seem to be able to do so without the participation (...) of other states. Second, more generally, I doubt that any such agreement could make otherwise unjustified killings permissible. (shrink)