This is the first volume compiling English translations of Leibniz's journal articles on natural philosophy, presenting a selection of 26 articles, only three of which have appeared before in English translation. It also includes in full Leibniz's public controversies with De Catelan, Papin, and Hartsoeker. The articles include work in optics, on the fracture strength of materials, and on motion in a resisting medium, and Leibniz's pioneering applications of his calculus to these issues by construing them as mini-max and inverse (...) tangent problems. Other topics covered by the articles include: criticisms of the Cartesian estimate of motive force and Leibniz's proposal of a different way of estimating force to replace it; a proposed theory of celestial motions and gravitation, and derivation of the inverse square law; challenge problems concerning the isochronous curve and the catenary; a sample of work on gaming theory; and Leibniz's critique of atomism. (shrink)

We present a game mechanic called pseudo-visibility for games inhabited by non-player characters (NPCs) driven by reinforcement learning (RL). NPCs are incentivized to pretend they cannot see pseudo-visible players: the training environment simulates an NPC to determine how the NPC would act if the pseudo-visible player were invisible, and penalizes the NPC for acting differently. NPCs are thereby trained to selectively ignore pseudo-visible players, except when they judge that the reaction penalty is an acceptable tradeoff (e.g., a guard might accept (...) the penalty in order to protect a treasure because losing the treasure would hurt even more). We describe an RL agent transformation which allows RL agents that would not otherwise do so to perform some limited self-reflection to learn the training environments in question. (shrink)

A fundamental question asked in modal logic is whether a given theory is consistent. But consistent with what? A typical way to address this question identifies a choice of background knowledge axioms (say, S4, D, etc.) and then shows the assumptions codified by the theory in question to be consistent with those background axioms. But determining the specific choice and division of background axioms is, at least sometimes, little more than tradition. This paper introduces generic theories for propositional modal logic (...) to address consistency results in a more robust way. As building blocks for background knowledge, generic theories provide a standard for categorical determinations of consistency. We argue that the results and methods of this paper help to elucidate problems in epistemology and enjoy sufficient scope and power to have purchase on problems bearing on modalities in judgement, inference, and decision making. (shrink)

The Jubilee Centre’s new report, Virtuous Medical Practice, examines the place of character and values in the medical profession in Britain today. Its findings are drawn from a UK-focused multi-methods study of 549 doctors and aspiring doctors at three career stages, first and final year students and experienced doctors.

A central theme of this book is that the main problems of philosophy and certainly the main traditional problems in the theory of knowledge, concern the space between language and the world. Professor Danto distinguishes between descriptive concepts, concerned with saying how the world is and semantic concepts, which have to do with the application of descriptions of the world. Failure to make these distinctions is responsible for a class of seemingly irresolvable disputes over the foundations of knowledge; but when (...) the distinction is appreciated, a plausible philosophical theory of what it is to know the world can be framed which is free from the standard scepticisms. (shrink)

Patients have received experimental pharmaceuticals outside of clinical trials for decades. There are no industry-wide best practices, and many companies that have granted compassionate use, or ‘preapproval’, access to their investigational products have done so without fanfare and without divulging the process or grounds on which decisions were made. The number of compassionate use requests has increased over time. Driving the demand are new treatments for serious unmet medical needs; patient advocacy groups pressing for access to emerging treatments; internet platforms (...) enabling broad awareness of compelling cases or novel drugs and a lack of trust among some that the pharmaceutical industry and/or the FDA have patients’ best interests in mind. High-profile cases in the media have highlighted the gap between patient expectations for compassionate use and company utilisation of fair processes to adjudicate requests. With many pharmaceutical manufacturers, patient groups, healthcare providers and policy analysts unhappy with the inequities of the status quo, fairer and more ethical management of compassionate use requests was needed. This paper reports on a novel collaboration between a pharmaceutical company and an academic medical ethics department that led to the formation of the Compassionate Use Advisory Committee. Comprising medical experts, bioethicists and patient representatives, CompAC established an ethical framework for the allocation of a scarce investigational oncology agent to single patients requesting non-trial access. This is the first account of how the committee was formed and how it built an ethical framework and put it into practice. (shrink)

The need for organs to transplant is clear. Due to the lack of transplants, people suffer, they die, and the cost of taking care of them until they die is huge. There is general agreement that it would be good to increase the supply of organs in order to meet the demand for organ transplantation.

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)

Biomedical science suffered a loss of trust during the Covid‐19 pandemic. Why? One reason is a crisis fueled by confusion over the epistemology of science. Attacks on biomedical expertise rest on a mistaken view of what the justification is for crediting scientific information. The ideas that science is characterized by universal agreement and that any evolution or change of beliefs about facts and theories undermines trustworthiness in science are simply false. Biomedical science is trustworthy precisely because it is fallible, admits (...) error, adjusts to new information, and, most importantly, is practical. Successful diagnosis and cure demarcate the boundaries of warranted knowledge. The other reason is sociological. As the pandemic made all too clear, the loss of faith in scientific experts was due to the failure of most of them to engage in regular public dialogue, reflecting a failure to recognize the obligation that science has to bolster trust in its work and findings by concerted public engagement. (shrink)

We show that the theories “ZFC \ There is a supercompact cardinal” and “ZFC \ There is a supercompact cardinal \ Level by level inequivalence between strong compactness and supercompactness holds” are equiconsistent.

At the end of the 19th century, most professional historians – wherever they existed – deemed history to be a form of knowledge ruled by a method that bears no resemblance with those most commonly traceable in the natural sciences. The bulk of the historian’s task was then frequently regarded as being the application of procedures frequently referred to as ‘historical method’. In the context of such an emerging interest on historical methods and methodology, at least three textbooks stand out: (...) Johann Gustav Droysen’s Grundriss der Historik (Outline of the Theory of History), Ernst Bernheim’s Lehrbuch der historischen Methode (Handbook of Historical Method), and Charles Langlois and Charles Seignobos’s Introduction aux études historiques (Introduction to the Study of History). These books were quite influential in Germany, France, and elsewhere, and they very much helped promote a general idea of historical method that would become relatively consensual among historians of many nationalities by the early 20th century. Such a relative agreement on historical method sponsored both the communication and the development of a sense of disciplinary identity among historians trained within different and sometimes conflicting national traditions. It was then partially extended, partially challenged, and surely made more complex when, from the 1920s on, social and economic historians became a good part of the historiographical establishment in many countries. -/- The three books by Droysen, Bernheim, and Langlois and Seignobos were already pieced together by Rolf Torstendahl, who studied them as a group of texts that, despite their differences, contributed to shape the developments outlined above. However, Torstendahl’s primary aim was to show how Droysen, Bernheim, and Seignobos all resorted to ‘method’ as a way to circumvent skepticism against the possibility of historical knowledge, rather than investigate the internal interrelationships between the three texts. In this chapter I follow precisely this latter, not yet taken, road, focusing on crucial cross-references between the Grundriss, the Lehrbuch, and the Introduction. I intend to show that, at a general level, the schemes of historical method found in these texts are largely convergent, and that this convergence is due to Bernheim’s reading of Droysen and to Langlois and Seignobos’s reading of Bernheim. I will attempt to do it through a regressive approach that starts with an analysis of the Introduction. Aspects of the editorial history and circulation of the three texts will also be briefly addressed, as a way to illustrate their special importance within the framework of early 20th century historical theory. Because my argument calls for a focus on the most general lines of Droysen’s, Bernheim’s, and Langlois and Seignobos’s schemes of historical method, I will, for the sake of consistency, refrain from analysing in-depth the complex epistemological and ontological arguments in which those schemes are nested. (shrink)

Individual differences in phonological processing abilities have often been attributed to perceptual factors, rather than to factors relating to learning and memory. Here, we consider the contribution of individual differences in declarative and procedural memory to phonological processing performance in adulthood. We examined the phonological processing, declarative memory, and procedural memory abilities of 79 native English-speaking young adults with typical language and reading abilities. Declarative memory was assessed with a recognition memory task of real and made-up objects. Procedural memory was (...) assessed with a serial reaction time task. For both tasks, learning was assessed shortly after encoding, and again after a 12-h, overnight delay. We regressed phonological processing ability with memory performance on both days. We found that declarative memory, but not procedural memory, was highly predictive of phonological processing abilities. Specifically, declarative memory scores obtained shortly after learning were associated with non-word repetition performance, whereas declarative memory scores obtained after the overnight delay were associated with phonological awareness. Procedural memory was not associated with either of the phonological processing measures. We discuss these findings in the context of adult participants with mature phonological systems. We examine possible implications for the relationship between declarative memory and phonological processing in adulthood. (shrink)

Branches is the very first volume to diverge from the classical Hasidic path in modernizing influential writings from bygone eras for our times. Eighteen offerings by leading neo-Hasidic thinkers treat such delicate issues as what is halakhah, does a new Hasidism need a rebbe, how might women newly enter this heretonow gendered universe of God-aspects created by and for men, and how to honor and grow from other religions' teachings.

In this ground-breaking presentation of Neo-Hasidic philosophy, Green and Mayse draw together the writings of five great twentieth-century European and American Jewish thinkers--Hillel Zeitlin, Martin Buber, Abraham Joshu Heschel, Shlomo Carlebach, Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, plus some of Green's own youthful writings -- sharing each of their reflections on the inner life of the individual and their dreams of creating Neo-Hasidic spiritual communities.

The Jubilee Centre’s new report, Virtuous Character for the Practice of Law, sets about trying to examine the place of character and values in the legal profession in Britain. The report draws its findings from a UK focused survey of 966 lawyers and aspiring lawyers at varying stages of their careers. It is one of the largest pieces of research carried out in Britain focusing on issues of character and virtue within a specific industry sector.

There has been across the world a resurgence of interest in ‘values education’ at school education, research and policy levels. In Australia the Australian Values Education projects led to the government initiating a number of large scale curriculum developments and resources projects as part of its expressed policy to introduce values education programmes in all schools. UNESCO has its own values education programme, entitled Living Values that functions in 84 countries. In the United Kingdom, the introduction of the National Curriculum (...) in England has led to a major effort to develop what is variously described as a ‘moral’ or ‘ethical’ perspective. In England, the education of the moral child has been both an underpinning aspiration of the National Curriculum and a focus of particular curricular subjects, most notably citizenship education. The purpose of this book is to make a contribution to this emerging field, and to do so in two ways. First, it presents a substantial body of empirical evidence, the results of the largest UK study to date of what parents, pupils and teachers are thinking and doing in the area of moral education and, more specifically, ‘character education’. Second, it seeks to elucidate more clearly what those involved in the debate mean by the terms used. The terms used in relation to moral and character education are not fixed, and are sometimes used apparently in different senses, by different contributors, and for different purposes. As a result of these two features, the present work offers some suggestions about possible ways forward in developing concrete proposals for moral education, in particular in identifying an appropriate language that can be used by practitioners in situations ‘on the ground’. (shrink)