Book reviewed in this article: PBB: An American Tragedy. By Edwin Chen. The Law and Policy of Toxic Substances Control: A Case Study of Vinyl Chloride. By David D. Doniger.

If the Past Hypothesis underlies the arrows of time, what is the status of the Past Hypothesis? In this paper, I examine the role of the Past Hypothesis in the Boltzmannian account and defend the view that the Past Hypothesis is a candidate fundamental law of nature. Such a view is known to be compatible with Humeanism about laws, but as I argue it is also supported by a minimal non-Humean "governing'' view. Some worries arise from the non-dynamical and time-dependent (...) character of the Past Hypothesis as a boundary condition, the intrinsic vagueness in its specification, and the nature of the initial probability distribution. I show that these worries do not have much force, and in any case they become less relevant in a new quantum framework for analyzing time's arrows---the Wentaculus. Hence, the view that the Past Hypothesis is a candidate fundamental law should be more widely accepted than it is now. (shrink)

This book provides a new philosophical, semantical and historical analysis of and justification for the relevant logic of entailment. Its fresh and original perspective on the logic of entailment will be valuable for all who want to know more about the historical and philosophical origins of modern symbolic logic.

In this paper, I argue that Ubuntu can be construed as a strict form of cosmopolitan moral and political theory. The implication of this is that the duty or obligation that humans owe other humans arises in virtue of humanity or the notion of human-ness. That is, one is a person insofar as he or she forms humane relations and it is this particular way of beingness that makes every person both an object and subject of duty. On this cosmopolitan (...) interpretation of Ubuntu, I therefore, argue that Ubuntu would support the principle of natural resource redistribution according to which all humans fall within the scope of justice and the principles of distributive justice. If this is right, then Ubuntu’s cosmopolitanism has something to contribute generally to cosmopolitanism, as an account of global justice. (shrink)

The Great Divide in metaphysical debates about laws of nature is between Humeans, who think that laws merely describe the distribution of matter, and non-Humeans, who think that laws govern it. The metaphysics can place demands on the proper formulations of physical theories. It is sometimes assumed that the governing view requires a fundamental / intrinsic direction of time: to govern, laws must be dynamical, producing later states of the world from earlier ones, in accord with the fundamental direction of (...) time in the universe. In this paper, we propose a minimal primitivism about laws of nature (MinP) according to which there is no such requirement. On our view, laws govern by constraining the physical possibilities. Our view captures the essence of the governing view without taking on extraneous commitments about the direction of time or dynamic production. Moreover, as a version of primitivism, our view requires no reduction / analysis of laws in terms of universals, powers, or dispositions. Our view accommodates several potential candidates for fundamental laws, including the principle of least action, the Past Hypothesis, the Einstein equation of general relativity, and even controversial examples found in the Wheeler-Feynman theory of electrodynamics and retrocausal theories of quantum mechanics. By understanding governing as constraining, non-Humeans who accept MinP have the same freedom to contemplate a wide variety of candidate fundamental laws as Humeans do. (shrink)

Back in print are Hatch's classic Hibbert Lectures in which he calls into question the influence that Greek ideas had on the historical development of Christian theology. The earliest forms of Christianity were not only outside the sphere of Greek philosophy, but they also appealed, on the one hand, mainly to the classes which philosophy did not reach, and, on the other hand, to a standard which philosophy did not recognize. Edwin Hatch.

Cover -- Title -- Copyright -- Dedication -- Contents -- Contributors -- Series Editor's Foreword -- Preface: A 'Science' of Psychology: The Enduring Aspiration -- Introduction: Science, Scientism, and Psychology -- 1 Epistemology and the Boundaries Between Phenomena and Conventions -- 2 Hayek and Hempel on the Nature, Role, and Limitations of Science -- 3 On Scientism in Psychology: Some Observations of Historical Relevance -- 4 Why Science Needs Intuition -- 5 Scientism and Saturation: Evolutionary Psychology, Human Experience, and the (...) Phenomenology of Jean-Luc Marion -- 6 Psychotherapy and Scientism -- 7 Science and Society: Effects, Reactions, and a Call for Reformation -- 8 Beyond Scientism: Reaches in Psychology Toward a Science of Consciousness -- Index. (shrink)

Hutchins examines a set of phenomena that have fallen between the established disciplines of psychology and anthropology, bringing to light a new set of relationships between culture and cognition.

Collaboration on the First Edition of Spacetime Physics began in the mid-1960s when Edwin Taylor took a junior faculty sabbatical at Princeton University where John Wheeler was a professor. The resulting text emphasized the unity of spacetime and those quantities (such as proper time, proper distance, mass) that are invariant, the same for all observers, rather than those quantities (such as space and time separations) that are relative, different for different observers. The book has become a standard introduction to (...) relativity. The Second Edition of Spacetime Physics embodies what the authors have learned during an additional quarter century of teaching and research. They have updated the text to reflect the immense strides in physics during the same period and modernized and increased the number of exercises, for which the First Edition was famous. Enrichment boxes provide expanded coverage of intriguing topics. An enlarged final chapter on general relativity includes new material on gravity waves, black holes, and cosmology. The Second Edition of Spacetime Physics provides a new generation of readers with a deep and simple overview of the principles of relativity. (shrink)

In this paper, I characterize and elaborate on the “Wentaculus” theory, a new approach to time’s arrow in a quantum universe that offers a unified solution to the problems of what gives rise to the arrow of time and what the ontology of quantum mechanics is.

INTRODUCTION STATEMENT OF THE THESIS To the student of the social sciences it is interesting to observe the process by which, in one respect at least, ...

In their forthcoming article, ‘What makes a medical intervention invasive?’ De Marco, Simons, and colleagues explore the meaning and usage of the term ‘invasive’ in medical contexts. They describe a ‘Standard Account’, drawn from dictionary definitions, which defines invasiveness as ‘incision of the skin or insertion of an object into the body’. They then highlight cases wherein invasiveness is employed in a manner that is inconsistent with this account (eg, in describing psychotherapy) to argue that the term invasiveness is often (...) used to explicitly or implicitly reference interventions that do not fall under the standard account. The authors offer an alternative ‘schematic’ definition of invasiveness, whereby medical interventions entail an underlying context-independent property of ‘basic invasiveness’ and may be understood both relative to each other and to a context-specific threshold of what is ‘invasive’. 1 We propose that the meaning of terms such as ‘invasiveness’ is necessarily heterogeneous,... (shrink)

E. Fuller Torrey draws on cutting-edge neuroscience research to propose a startling answer to the ultimate question. Evolving Brains, Emerging Gods locates the origin of gods within the human brain, arguing that religious belief is a by-product of evolution.

If you were trained as a philosopher and were suddenly bereft of speech, writing and reading, how would you feel? Would you feel a sensation of death, or Nirvana, or unconscious or conscious loss of control? Would you feel scientifically objective, or full of Aristotelian wonder? Would you think you were having a supernatural experience?

Quelles sont les capacités et valeurs qui peuvent animer des académiques en ces temps de changement où nous vivons?? À cette question, généralement non explicite dans leurs travaux, ont répondu quinze chercheuses et chercheurs de différentes spécialités. En revisitant leurs thèmes de recherche ou leur parcours sous cet angle, il se dessine une constellation où semblent émerger trois pôles?: critique, imagination, interdépendance.00Avec les contributions de : 00Philippe Baret, Tom Bauler, Philippe Bourdeau, Isabelle Ferreras, François Gemenne, Marie-Françoise Godart, Marine Lugen, Delphine (...) Misonne, Muriel Moser, François Ost, Benoît Timmermans, Christian Vandermotten, Didier Viviers et Arnaud Zacharie. (shrink)

A biography of the seventeenth-century French mathematician and philosopher whose revolutionary methods of reasoning greatly influenced future scientific thinking.

Di 1 bian. Kongzi si xiang ji lun yu -- di 2 bian. Mengzi si xiang ji Meng Xun tong yi -- di 3 bian. Gaozi si xiang -- di 4 bian. Ming li -- di 5 bian. Jiao yu xiu yang Wen hua.

When we know who we truly are, rather than who we take ourselves to be, we will realize that we are indeed the hero of our story and that we need not look to others or the world to find our heart's desire.

Ray Lankester, in his book Nature and Man, deals with the states of man and nature. In this book, he shows the similarities between them and explains why their union was so important for the whole human race. When discussing Darwinism, he questions its epistemological foundations and criticizes the stage-stage theory of evolution. Ray Lankester concludes by giving us a glimpse into the future of humanity and our planet: "It seems to me that this marvelous endowment would be all turned (...) to good account if we did not allow ourselves to be easily led astray by ideas of a possible future...we should rather insist on increasing our knowledge within due limits, anxious not so much to extend its scope as to increase our capacity for dealing with problems as they arise". (shrink)

Drawing on the core values of western civilization, the author refines the counterparts in Chinese civilization, summarized as four core principles: duty before freedom, obedience before rights, community before individual, and harmony before conflict. Focusing on guoxue or Sinology as the basis of his approach, the author provides detailed explanations of traditional Chinese values. Recent scholars have addressed the concept of guoxue since the modern age, sorting through it and piecing it together, which has produced an extremely abundant range of (...) information. However, given that the concepts and theories involved have been left largely unanalyzed, this book develops a theoretical treatment of them in several important respects. First, it analyzes the mindset of guoxue, examining the dominant ideas and values of the era from which the term "guoxue" arose, focusing on its connection to early changes and trends in society and culture, and distinguishing three key phases of development. Past scholars mainly had in mind the range of objects studied in guoxue when defining it, and what this book underscores is the meaning of guoxue as a modern body of research. Secondly, it assesses several phases in the modern evolution of the body of guoxue research from the beginning to the end of the 20th century, id est, ending with the later phase of the National Heritage movement. Third and lastly, the book explores the various main modes of modern guoxue, which correspond step by step with the evolutionary phases of guoxue research. (shrink)

CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION (A) Historical Problem Suggested by the Nature of Modern Thought How curious, after all, is the way in which we moderns think about ...

Cognitive science normally takes the individual agent as its unit of analysis. In many human endeavors, however, the outcomes of interest are not determined entirely by the information processing properties of individuals. Nor can they be inferred from the properties of the individual agents, alone, no matter how detailed the knowledge of the properties of those individuals may be. In commercial aviation, for example, the successful completion of a flight is produced by a system that typically includes two or more (...) pilots interacting with each other and with a suite of technological devices. This article presents a theoretical framework that takes a distributed, socio‐technical system rather than an individual mind as its primary unit of analysis. This framework is explicitly cognitive in that it is concerned with how information is represented and how representations are transformed and propagated in the performance of tasks. An analysis of a memory task in the cockpit of a commercial airliner shows how the cognitive properties of such distributed systems can differ radically from the cognitive properties of the individuals who inhabit them. (shrink)