This book offers an original new account of one of Aristotle's central doctrines. Freudenthal He recreates from Aristotle's writings a more complete theory of material substance which is able to explain the problematical areas of the way matter organizes itself and the persistence of matter, to show that the hitherto ignored concept of vital heat is as central in explaining material substance as soul or form.

Is it only yesterday's humanism, whether religious or secular in origin, that is dying - and is it really dying? - or is it more profoundly the very paradigm of humanity? At least it is worth asking the question. Do we not hear on every side today that everything is ‘constructed’ and ‘formated’? No inherited moral standard now seems acceptable, nor any reference to any sort of human nature or naturality. The only idea that henceforth finds acceptance is that of (...) the infinite plasticity of the human, leaving individuals free to shape themselves as they wish beyond any commonly received standard, since only defiance of the norm seems to be the source and proof of freedom. (shrink)

This book is the result of several decades of teaching experience in data structures and algorithms. It is self-contained but does assume some prior knowledge of data structures, and a grasp of basic programming and mathematics tools. Basic Concepts in Algorithms focuses on more advanced paradigms and methods combining basic programming constructs as building blocks and their usefulness in the derivation of algorithms. Its coverage includes the algorithms' design process and an analysis of their performance. It is primarily intended as (...) a textbook for the teaching of Algorithms for second-year undergraduate students in study fields related to computers and programming. Klein reproduces his oral teaching style in writing, with one topic leading to another, related one. Most of the classical and some more advanced subjects in the theory of algorithms are covered, though not in a comprehensive manner. The topics include Divide and Conquer, Dynamic Programming, Graph algorithms, probabilistic algorithms, data compression, numerical algorithms and intractability. Each chapter comes with its own set of exercises, and solutions to most of them are appended. (shrink)

This book begins with Derrida's text, based on a lecture he gave in Montreal and is followed by two texts commenting on it. Derrida gives one of his most precise developments on the notion of 'l'événement' (event), that which comes to disturb the course of history and thus escapes the normal ways of being told and understood. His thought on the topic is crucial for future research on literature as testimony, refering to abnormal conditions of experience whose nature exceeds usual (...) narrative norms. This work is on two components of European culture : French West Indian and Black British literature (memory of slavery) and Spanish literature (civil war and refugees camps). Ce volume prolonge les réflexions du séminaire tenu à Montréal, articulé autour de la question " Dire l'événement, est-ce possible ? ". Les contributions de Gad Soussana ("De l'événement depuis la nuit" suivi de "Arriver") et d'Alexis Nouss ("Parole sans voix") tentent d'en prendre la mesure à partir des problématiques de l'origine et du posthume. Mais l'essentiel, en elles, aura été de susciter la réponse de Jacques Derrida : " Une certaine possibilité impossible de dire l'événement ". Plus qu'une simple rencontre, ce séminaire explicite la présence d'une pensée de l'événement au cœur de l'œuvre littéraire et de l'œuvre philosophique. (shrink)

This book centers on a relatively neglected theme in the scholarly literature on Hannah Arendt's political thought: her support for a new form of government in which citizen councils would replace contemporary representative democracy and allow citizens to participate directly in decision-making in the public sphere. The main argument of the book is that the council system, or more broadly the vision of participatory democracy was far more important to Arendt than is commonly understood. Seeking to demonstrate the close links (...) between the council system Arendt advocated and other major themes in her work, the book focuses particularly on her critique of the nation-state and her call for a new international order in which human dignity and “the right to have rights” will be guaranteed; her conception of “the political” and the conditions that can make this experience possible; the relationship between philosophy and politics; and the challenge of political judgement in the modern world. (shrink)

The development of modern Chinese thought involves an ongoing interaction between internal processes and impacts of foreign ideas. Several intellectual controversies are interwoven into its history and among these one of the more philosophical ones began some 90 years ago, in 1923. In this controversy, supporters of science or scientism and supporters of metaphysics or Confucian tradition debated issues of what both sides referred to as "the view of life." The study of the view of life controversy by Gad C. (...) Isay discusses the positions of the view of life supporters who upheld metaphysics against scientism. It focuses on both the philosophical merit of their views and the relevance of these views to the question of culture in modern China. Considering the sources of the view of life problem in traditional Chinese thought and the discussions that followed after the controversy, it is argued that the view of life question was a central theme in Chinese thought from its beginning. In this respect, modern discussions of this problem indicate continuity with the past. However, these discussions demonstrate too, the dynamics of changing conceptions regarding the context of human relationships that are related directly to the meeting with the West. Isay's study traces the development of these discussions from their beginning up to our days giving a comprehensive survey of the philosophy of the view of life in modern Chinese thought. (shrink)

The thinkers presented in these lectures by Bergman represent a radical departure from objectivism and subjectivism.

The degradation of the majority of cellular proteins is mediated by the proteasomes. Ubiquitin‐dependent proteasomal protein degradation is executed by a number of enzymes that interact to modify the substrates prior to their engagement with the 26S proteasomes. Alternatively, certain proteins are inherently unstable and undergo “default” degradation by the 20S proteasomes. Puzzlingly, proteins are by large subjected to both degradation pathways. Proteins with unstructured regions have been found to be substrates of the 20S proteasomes in vitro and, therefore, unstructured (...) regions may serve as signals for protein degradation “by default” in the cell. The literature is loaded with examples where engagement of a protein into larger complexes increases protein stability, possibly by escaping degradation “by default”. Our model suggests that formation of protein complexes masks the unstructured regions, making them inaccessible to the 20S proteasomes. This model not only provides molecular explanations for a recent theoretical “cooperative stability” principle, but also provokes new predictions and explanations in the field of protein regulation and functionality. BioEssays 28: 844–849, 2006. © 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

Both decentralization of state law and cultural relativism have been fundamentally embedded in legal pluralism. As a scholarly trend in law and society, it has insightfully challenged the underpinnings of analytical positivist jurisprudence. Nevertheless, a theoretical concept of political power has significantly been missing in research on the plurality of legal practices in various jurisdictions. This Article aims to critically offer a theoretical concept of political power that takes legal decentralization and cultural relativism seriously and yet points to how and (...) where we should look into political power, assuming that legal pluralism itself may be a strategy of elites and nation-states amid globalization. First, the Article explores the contributions of legal pluralism, and its limits, in intellectually revolting against analytical positivist jurisprudence. Second, it explicates why a concept of political power has been missing, and why such a concept is required for better comprehension of legal pluralism. Third, it calls for a look into three sites of political power in the praxis of legal pluralism: politics of identities, non-ruling communities, and neo-liberal globalization. Last, the Article constructs a concept of political-legal transformations that enables us to unveil political power in the context of de-centralized legal pluralities. Power is produced in, resides in and is generated in the dynamic interactions between nation-states, localities and global agents. Transformative relations along these dimensions allow the nation-state to forfeit some elements of power, both in economics and in law, but they also enable it to maintain some essential ingredients of political power that are often veiled in the rhetoric of globalized pluralism. (shrink)

This article considers the design and ideation of early modern Palermo’s urban waterscape, which traced the contours of a hybrid fluvial-maritime system surviving from antiquity. Framing the city’s port as a repository of collective memory and a site of self-construction, it questions how interventions undertaken between the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries - culminating in the ill-fated construction of the Molo Nuovo - recalibrated the interface between city and sea, and with it, Palermo’s identity. The port anchored the city’s cultural and (...) political ecologies, challenging the traditional divide between urban morphology and port planning. Using early modern Palermo as a guide, the article proposes a reinvestment in the interdisciplinary model of the urban waterscape, which regards water as a contested, socio-natural space. (shrink)

When harm is caused by multiple injurers, damages are allocated among the responsible injurers in proportion to their relative responsibility for harm. This Article shows that a proportional allocation of liability between strictly-liable injurers distorts incentives to take precautions. The effects of this distortion depend on the nature of the injurers’ precautions. If precautions are complements, injurers compete for lower liability shares, which results in excessive care-taking. If precautions are substitutes, injurers are afflicted by moral hazard, which gives rise to (...) insufficient care-taking. By illuminating injurers’ strategic incentives, this Article highlights a tension between equity and efficiency under a proportional allocation of liability. (shrink)

We continue the works of Gurevich-Shelah and Lifsches-Shelah by showing that it is consistent with ZFC that the first-order theory of random graphs is not interpretable in the monadic theory of all chains. It is provable from ZFC that the theory of random graphs is not interpretable in the monadic second order theory of short chains (hence, in the monadic theory of the real line).

Assume ZFC is consistent then for everyB⫅ω there is a generic extension of the ground world whereB is recursive in the monadic theory ofω 2.

Hannah Arendt’s conceptualization of political judgement has been a source of much scholarly investigation and debate in recent decades. Underlying the debate is the assumption that at least in her early writings, Arendt had an actor’s theory of judgement. In this article I challenge this common assumption. As I attempt to demonstrate, it relies on a misunderstanding, not only of Arendt’s conception of judgement, but also of her conception of agents in the public realm. Once we discard the assumption of (...) an actor’s theory of judgement, I argue, some important issues in Arendt’s theory of judgement are resolved, enabling us to perceive it as a unified, rather than self-contradictory, theory of judgement. (shrink)

Political honors are ubiquitous in public life, whether in the form of public monuments, street names, or national holidays. Yet such honors have received scant attention from normative political theorists. Tackling this gap, I begin by criticizing a desert-based approach to political honors. I then argue that morally appropriate honors are best understood as marking and reinforcing the moral commitments of the collective in whose name they are being awarded. I show how this thesis clarifies and organizes core intuitions regarding (...) a variety of honors, from those commemorating slave-owning founders of the United States to the Nobel Peace Prize. (shrink)

While Qian Mu intentionally avoided systematic philosophical arguments, his references to memory, language, and emotions, as expressed in a book he wrote in 1948, were suggestive of new interpretations of traditional Chinese, and especially Confucian, ideas such as human autonomy, mind, human nature, morality, immortality, and spirituality. The foremost contribution of Qian’s humanist synthesis rests in its articulation of the idea of the person. Across the context of memory, language, and emotions, the tiyong dynamics of mind and human nature recreate, (...) in modern terms, the traditional Chinese concept of the person who is individually unique and simultaneously interrelated. Avoiding the extreme polarities of individualism and collectivism, he stresses rather their coexistence. His synthesis explains to the Chinese people something about who they are, the meaning in life in the framework of their culture, and how their (revitalized) way of life is at its best in the most important area, that of human relations. (shrink)

Gurevich and Shelah have shown that Peano Arithmetic cannot be interpreted in the monadic second-order theory of short chains (hence, in the monadic second-order theory of the real line). We will show here that it is consistent that the monadic second-order theory of no chain interprets Peano Arithmetic.

The monadic second-order theory of trees allows quantification over elements and over arbitrary subsets. We classify the class of trees with respect to the question: does a tree T have a definable choice function (by a monadic formula with parameters)? A natural dichotomy arises where the trees that fall in the first class don't have a definable choice function and the trees in the second class have even a definable well ordering of their elements. This has a close connection to (...) the uniformization problem. (shrink)

James S. Coleman was the major proponent of rational choice theory. This article challenges the traditional reading of his work by showing that under the explicit theory of rational choice lay a latent non-rational theory of action. The article shows that instead of rationality, Coleman's psychological starting point was existential insecurity; that instead of the alleged mechanism of the maximization of utility, actors choose to conform to peer values and norms in order to alleviate insecurity; and that the optimal setting (...) for action is provided by intimate and dense communities, rather than unregulated free markets. These three non-rational presuppositions are analyzed and it is suggested that they are crucial for understanding Coleman's assessment of modernity, social change and his call for the rational reconstruction of society. (shrink)

Timeless lessons are retold here with reverence and charm. The values that we all want our children to absorb - faith, kindness, forgiveness, charity - are made clear through traditional, biblical stories coupled with examples, and charming illustrations by Tova Katz. Shmuel Blitz, the author of five other successful children's books, goes back to the greatest source of all - the Torah and the Prophets. Do your children and grandchildren (and yourself) a favor and get them this fine new (...) book. (shrink)

This article discusses an aspect of Hannah Arendt’s treatment of the conflict between the Zionists and the Palestinians that has thus far been overlooked in scholarship: her justification of Zionism through the achievements of the Jewish pioneers in cultivating the land, in contrast to the Palestinians’ failure to do so. The inability of natives to cultivate their land was a familiar argument in the history of colonialism, used to legitimize the colonialists’ right to settle a land and often to displace (...) the natives. How should we understand Arendt’s use of this argument? I show that Arendt’s argument should be understood in the context of, first, the recurrence of this argument in Western political thought and practices. Second, the Zionists’—Arendt included—need of legitimizing Jewish settlements in Palestine. And third, the influence of Arendt’s own political philosophy on her understanding of culture in general, and Palestinian culture in particular. (shrink)