It is shown that the covariance together with the quantum principle speak for an affinely connected structure which, for distances greater than Planck’s length, goes over in a metrically connected structure of space-time.

Intent and mitigating circumstances play a central role in moral and legal assessments in large-scale industrialized societies. Al- though these features of moral assessment are widely assumed to be universal, to date, they have only been studied in a narrow range of societies. We show that there is substantial cross-cultural variation among eight traditional small-scale societies (ranging from hunter-gatherer to pastoralist to horticulturalist) and two Western societies (one urban, one rural) in the extent to which intent and mitigating circumstances influence (...) moral judgments. Although participants in all societies took such factors into account to some degree, they did so to very different extents, varying in both the types of considerations taken into account and the types of violations to which such considerations were applied. The particular patterns of assessment characteristic of large-scale industrialized societies may thus reflect relatively recently culturally evolved norms rather than inherent features of human moral judgment. (shrink)

'The most thorough and scrupulous of contemporary students of induction' (the execrable Quinton 1993, p. 172).

_Zettel, _ an en face bilingual edition, collects fragments from Wittgenstein's work between 1929 and 1948 on issues of the mind, mathematics, and language.

Last October the German Ambassador to Britain delivered the annual Gresham Special Lecture in Gresham College in the City of London. The text of His Excellency's lecture is reproduced here with permission.

The text of the tract De arcubus similibus was published for the first time by M. Curtze in 1887. However, after examining some more Latin manuscripts and the Arabic MS Oxford, Bodleian Library, Marsh 663 it appeared, that Curtze's edition was rather an adaptation. Also Curtze's suggestion that Jordanus Nemorarius was the author was very probably wrong. The author of the tract was the Egyptian mathematician Ahmed ibn Jusuf as appears from the Latin manuscripts, and its translator, very probably, Gerard (...) of Cremona. In the tract Ahmed tried to prove, that the assertion ‘similar arcs are also equal arcs’ was wrong . His starting points were the propositions Euclid III, 20 and 21. Consequently, the tract can be looked upon as a commentary on the third book of the Elements. (shrink)

Purpose: Commenting on the transcript of a lecture. Findings: The document reconstructs the development of the original 1973 lecture by Heinz von Foerster into his best-known paper, On Constructing a Reality. Many aspects of that paper can be identified as being shaped through interaction with the audience. Implications: The lecture documented here was a forerunner of a central paper in constructivism.

Erläuterungen zur Beziehung zwischen Ludwig Wittgenstein und Ludwig von Ficker, von W. Methlagl.--Die Entstehung des Tractatus logico-philosophicus, von G. H. von Wright.

Decades of research conducted in Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, & Democratic (WEIRD) societies have led many scholars to conclude that the use of mental states in moral judgment is a human cognitive universal, perhaps an adaptive strategy for selecting optimal social partners from a large pool of candidates. However, recent work from a more diverse array of societies suggests there may be important variation in how much people rely on mental states, with people in some societies judging accidental harms just (...) as harshly as intentional ones. To explain this variation, we develop and test a novel cultural evolutionary theory proposing that the intensity of kin-based institutions will favor less attention to mental states when judging moral violations. First, to better illuminate the historical distribution of the use of intentions in moral judgment, we code and analyze anthropological observations from the Human Area Relations Files. This analysis shows that notions of strict liability—wherein the role for mental states is reduced—were common across diverse societies around the globe. Then, by expanding an existing vignette-based experimental dataset containing observations from 321 people in a diverse sample of 10 societies, we show that the intensity of a society's kin-based institutions can explain a substantial portion of the population-level variation in people's reliance on intentions in three different kinds of moral judgments. Together, these lines of evidence suggest that people's use of mental states has coevolved culturally to fit their local kin-based institutions. We suggest that although reliance on mental states has likely been a feature of moral judgment in human communities over historical and evolutionary time, the relational fluidity and weak kin ties of today's WEIRD societies position these populations' psychology at the extreme end of the global and historical spectrum. (shrink)

Zettel is a collection of fragments which Wittgenstein cut from various of his typescripts and preserved for future use. More than half of the fragments were written in the years 1946-1948, after the completion of Part I and before the composition of Part II of the Philosophical Investigations. This collection may therefore be regarded as a companion volume to the Investigations, adding to both the scope and the Unity of Wittgenstein′s chef d′oeuvre. The fragments were kept in a box and (...) were not strictly ordered. Many have marks showing changes and improvements made after they were cut from the typescripts; some have remarks added in handwriting. Editing the collection for publication was thus a task of considerable difficulty. Since Zettel was first published, further research has been carried out on the fragments and minute comparisons have been made with their typescript and manuscript sources, revealing certain inaccuracies and misinterpretations in the first editing of the work. The second edition corrects these shortcomings and includes new explanatory footnotes; a detailed index, compiled by Stephen Amdur, has also been added. (shrink)

The spatial dynamics of the optical emission from an array of 50 times 50 individual microcavity plasma devices is investigated. The array is operated in argon and argon-neon mixtures close to atmospheric pressure with an ac voltage. The optical emission is analysed with phase and space resolution. It has been found that the emission is not continuous over the entire ac period, but occurs once per half period. Each of the observed emission phases shows a self-pulsing of the discharge, with (...) several bursts of emission of fixed width and repetition rate. The number of emission bursts depends on applied voltage and frequency. Spatially resolved measurements prove that the emission bursts are formed by overlapping emission pulses from single discharge cavities. Intensity differences between positive and negative half-wave can be interpreted through spatially resolved measurements of single discharge cavities. (shrink)

ZusammenfassunuIn dem vorliegenden Bericht über einige Arbeiten des Verfassers und eine daran anschliessende Arbeit von G. Emde, Marburg, wird eine Reihe von Ergebnissen behandelt, die die Kombinationen der Grundmodalitäten « Möglichkeit » und « Notwendigkeit » betreffen. Ausgehend von sehr allgemeinen Rahmenkodifikaten wird die durch Basisreduktion zu gewinnende Liste der endlich vielen implikativen Modalitätenlogiken mit idempotenter Möglichkeit erörtert; bei wichtigen Unterklassen der nicht notwendig idempotenten implikativen Modalitätenlogiken treten neben der Basisreduktion vor allem spezielle Entscheidungsprobleme in den Vordergrund.RésuméDans le rapport ci‐dessus (...) concernant quelques travaux de l'auteur et le travail de M. G. Emde qui s'y rapporte, il s'agit d'un ensemble de résultats sur la combinaison des modalités fondamentales de « possibilité» et de « nécessité». Partant de quelques codifications cadres très générales, I'auteur discute la liste en nombre fini des logiques modales implicatives à« possibilité» idempotente, une liste qui est obtenue par une réduction des bases. Quant à certaines sous‐classes importantes des logiques implicatives qui ne sont pas nécessairement idempotentes, outre la réduction des bases, les problèmes de décision qui leur sont spéciaux, se trouvent placés au premier plan.In the present report on some papers of the author and on a sequel to them by G. Emde, Marburg, a series of results concerning the combination of the basic modalities « possibility » and « necessity » are treated. Starting from some very general framing‐codifications, the list of the finitely many implicative modal logics with idempotent « possibility » which is obtainable through basis reduction is discussed. Besides basis reduction, in the case of some important subclasses of the not‐necessarily‐idempotent implicative modal logics, attention is given to the special decision problems. (shrink)

For the last 25 years, since publication of his Logical Studies, Professor Von Wright has steadily explored the field of philosophical logic. The concept of negation, logical paradoxes, the puzzles connected with evidence and probability in confirmation theory, the interrelatedness of the ideas of time and change, and the clarification of the structure of temporal and spatial orderings are among the many areas he has profitably investigated. -- "Philosophical Review".