John Buridan was a fourteenth-century philosopher who enjoyed an enormous reputation for about two hundred years, was then totally neglected, and is now being 'rediscovered' through his relevance to contemporary work in philosophical logic. The final chapter of Buridan's Sophismata deals with problems about self-reference, and in particular with the semantic paradoxes. He offers his own distinctive solution to the well-known 'Liar Paradox' and introduces a number of other paradoxes that will be unfamiliar to most logicians. Buridan also moves on (...) from these problems to more general questions about the nature of propositions, the criteria of their truth and falsity and the concepts of validity and knowledge. This edition of that chapter is intended to make Buridan's ideas and arguments accessible to a wider range of readers. The volume should interest many philosophers, linguists and logicians, who are increasingly finding in medieval work striking anticipations of their own concerns. (shrink)

COVID-19 has stolen millions of lives and devastated livelihoods around the world and led to the exacerbation of existing inequities within and between countries. This part of a tragic pattern in catastrophes, where the most vulnerable populations are typically the ones to bear the greatest burdens. Jecker and Au1 offer a keen observation of how one particular COVID-19 response—Zero COVID—appears particularly problematic from a health equity perspective. Under Zero COVID, countries enact stringent lockdowns and movement restrictions in order to keep (...) cases as low as possible. Yet such restrictive policies hurt disadvantaged populations the most, by severely curtailing their ability to earn a living and forcing them to remain in cramped living spaces for potentially extended periods of time. However, the link between Zero COVID and health inequity is more complex than it might at first appear. This is because Zero COVID is itself compatible with meaningful efforts to mitigate inequities, including those caused by Zero COVID policies themselves. Conversely, certain inequities seemingly characterised by Zero COVID may persist even when Zero COVID is abandoned, indicating their ultimate root and …. (shrink)

This chapter contains section titled: Introduction.

Originally published in 1965. This is a textbook of modern deductive logic, designed for beginners but leading further into the heart of the subject than most other books of the kind. The fields covered are the Propositional Calculus, the more elementary parts of the Predicate Calculus, and Syllogistic Logic treated from a modern point of view. In each of the systems discussed the main emphases are on Decision Procedures and Axiomatisation, and the material is presented with as much formal rigour (...) as is compatible with clarity of exposition. The techniques used are not only described but given a theoretical justification. Proofs of Consistency, Completeness and Independence are set out in detail. The fundamental characteristics of the various systems studies, and their relations to each other are established by meta-logical proofs, which are used freely in all sections of the book. Exercises are appended to most of the chapters, and answers are provided. (shrink)

Book Information Well-Being and Morality: Essays in Honour of James Griffin. Edited by Roger Crisp and Brad Hooker. Clarendon Press. Oxford. 2000. Pp. xii + 316. Hardback, £35.

Property and political obligation are central issues of Locke's Two Treatises of Government. It is agreed that obligation is somehow contingent upon the government's protecting the property of its members. But ‘property’ in the Two Treatises had two meanings — in the state of nature usually referring to material possessions but in civil society meaning ‘life, liberty and estate’ — and its relationship to political obligation is complex. This complexity results from Locke's varying accounts of the movement from the state (...) of nature to civil society: he combined a traditional natural law justification of ownership with a legalist and semi-Aristotelian conception of the ends of and limitations on the state; he failed to provide a full account of the obligation of landless residents; he left unsettled difficulties inherent in the concept ‘property’ itself. Locke's notions of ‘trust’ and the ‘public good’ pointed to solutions to be worked out by future generations. (shrink)

The problems of this passage were concisely stated by M. Platnauer more than thirty years ago and his suggestions for their solution have been adopted and developed in A. S. F. Gow's magnum opus. Its authority—so the present writer suspects—is liable at this point to eclipse the meaning of the text.

Traditionally, dream research focuses on accounting for typical psychological features of dream experiences characteristic of different sleep stages in terms of the global physiological features of the sleep stages in question. However, as subtle differences got into the forefront of enquiry, as, for example, in questions concerning between-stage similarities and within-stage differences of mentations, this methodology became insufficient. What recent findings and theoretical developments suggest is that understanding mental activity during sleep requires studying the fine-grained characteristics of the phenomenal features (...) of individual dreams, which, in turn, demands identifying specific neural processes that might underlie different characteristics of the experiences, and tracking their changes not just between but also within standard sleep stages. The paper argues that such a shift of focus from describing global stages to understanding the significance of local changes results in a true paradigm shift in dream research that can break away from the tradition of thinking about sleep mentation in terms of discrete categories, and offers a novel way of looking at dreams as forming a multidimensional continuum. (shrink)

Автор бросает вызов с одной стороны как материалистической, так и идеалистической философии прошлого и настоящего, с другой - канонической космологической теории Большого взрыва, основанной на принципах механицизма, присущего естествознанию наших дней.

A geometric formulation of the gravitation theory in the spacetime R × S 3 is given. A linear connection is introduced on the tangent bundle T(R × S 3 ) and then the connection coefficients and the Riemann curvature tensor are calculated. It is shown that their expressions differ from those of Carmeli and Malin [Found. Phys.17, 407 (1987)] by supplementary terms due to the noncommutativity of derivatives used on the spacetime R × S 3 . The Einstein field equations (...) are written as usually and a comparison with other results is given. Finally, some observations about a possible gauge theory of gravitation in the spacetime R × S 3 are made. (shrink)

A model for gauge theories over a compact Lie group is described using R × S3 as background space. The U(1) and SU(2) gauge theories are considered as particular examples, and a comparison with other results is given. Our results differ from those of Carmeli and MalinFound. Phys. 16, 791 (1986);17, 193 (1987)] by a supplementary term in the curvature tensor due to the noncommutativity of derivatives used on R × S3 space. Some observations about supersymmetry and gravity on R (...) × S3 space are also given. (shrink)