This book challenges the widespread assumption of the incompatibility of evolution and the biological design argument. Kojonen analyzes the traditional arguments for incompatibility, and argues for salvaging the idea of design in a way that is fully compatible with evolutionary biology. Relating current views to their intellectual history, Kojonen steers a course that avoids common pitfalls such as the problems of the God of the gaps, the problem of natural evil, and the traditional Humean and Darwinian critiques. The resulting deconstruction (...) of the opposition between evolution and design has the potential to transform this important debate. (shrink)

This book is a lucid and readable account of Spinoza, Hume, Kant, Nietzsche, James, and Santayana, not only as contributors to present-day secularism, but as precursors of religious liberalism. Beck traces the theme of "secularism and human values" through these thinkers, though difficulties arise from the fact that they represent a radical divergence of philosophic interests, and in any case would hardly have recognized, much less defended, the particular variety of secularism and religious liberalism that has arisen in recent times, (...) and with which the author associates them.—T. E. V. (shrink)

This paper is concerned with the combinator representation of numeral systems with logarithmic space complexity of symbols. The principle used is based on the lexicographic ordering of words over a finite alphabet.

In the whole theory of the Latin tenses there is no more popular item than this explanation by Roby of the use of the pluperfect indicative in unreal conditional sentences. Far the most familiar instance is that in Horace , ‘me truncus illapsus cerebro sustulerat, nisi Faunus ictum dextra leuasset.’.

Among the many names violently consigned to oblivion, one cannot omit mentioning the name of Gustav Gustavovich Shpet, a scholar who made a substantial contribution to our country's philosophy, psychology, aesthetics, and linguistics. His rehabilitation in 1956 was not enough to restore his memory in public consciousness, paralyzed by the inertia and fears of the Stalinist years, and the freeze that began soon after, of the sprouts that had just been summoned to life, had its impact in an abrogation of (...) agreements, cessation of publications, and in a number of cases removal of references to the philosopher. And the further thirty years of oblivion that followed were one more period of unjust punishment and a new ordeal in the terrible fate of the scholar and his ideas. His writings, which should have been a new word in science, should have given direction to further investigations, became effectively inaccessible to subsequent generations. References to Shpet in the works of Viach. Vs. Ivanov, Iu. M. Lotman, D. S. Likhachev, A. P. Chudakov, and others, and the article in Philosophical Encyclopedia [Filosofskaia entsiklopediia] written by V. S. Asmus aroused interest in Shpet's writings in Hungary and Germany. In the summer of 1986, an international conference on Shpet was held in Bochum, and his books are being translated. Unfortunately, in his own country the level of research on the philosopher's writings and thoughts is still almost at point zero, but we may hope that interest in Shpet's ideas will grow considerably in connection with the publication of the series From the History of Russian Philosophical Thought [Iz istorii otechestvennoi filosofskoi mysli] and a number of other publications. (shrink)

In the period of the general crisis of capitalism and the revolutionary transition from capitalism to socialism, the trends and prospects for the historical development of society have become the central question in the ideological struggle.