This volume explores on the material, social, and ideological aspects of Asoka's reign in light of advances made in archaeology, epigraphy, and numismatics. Thematically divided into three parts, the first to pillars and rocks, which bear his inscriptions. The second part examines the interconnectedness of the edicts, their monumentality, and the different concept of kingship they conveyed. The third part analyses the making of the cultural memory of Asoka and raises pertinent questions crucial for understanding the relationship between the past (...) and the present. The essays outline the importance of Asoka not only for the Indian nation-state but also for the entire Buddhist world of South and South-east Asia. Moving away from conventional periodization of Indian history, it raises important questions on the beginning of history and archaeology in the modern period. The book examines the extent to which nineteenth century initiatives have affected the study of Asoka and his reign. (shrink)

Mitigating response distortion in answers to sensitive questions is an important issue for business ethics researchers. Sensitive questions may be asked in surveys related to business ethics, and respondents may intend to avoid exposing sensitive aspects of their character by answering such questions dishonestly, resulting in response distortion. Previous studies have provided evidence that a surveying procedure called the randomized response technique is useful for mitigating such distortion. However, previous studies have mainly applied the RRT to individual dichotomous questions in (...) face-to-face survey settings. In this study, we focus on behavioral research examining the relationships between latent variables, which are unobserved variables measured by multiple items on Likert or bipolar scales. To demonstrate how the RRT can be applied to obtain valid answers from respondents answering a self-administered online questionnaire with Likert and bipolar scales, we build a behavioral model to study the effect of punishment severity on employees’ attitudes toward misuse of information systems resources in the workplace, which in turn influence misuse behavior. The survey findings meet our expectations. The respondents are generally more willing to disclose sensitive data about their attitudes and actual behavior related to misuse when the RRT is implemented. The RRT’s implications for causal modeling and the advantages and challenges of its use in online environments are also discussed. (shrink)

We are developing the Neurological Disease Ontology (ND) to provide a framework to enable representation of aspects of neurological diseases that are relevant to their treatment and study. ND is a representational tool that addresses the need for unambiguous annotation, storage, and retrieval of data associated with the treatment and study of neurological diseases. ND is being developed in compliance with the Open Biomedical Ontology Foundry principles and builds upon the paradigm established by the Ontology for General Medical Science (OGMS) (...) for the representation of entities in the domain of disease and medical practice. Initial applications of ND will include the annotation and analysis of large data sets and patient records for Alzheimer’s disease, multiple sclerosis, and stroke. (shrink)

Paper edition (unseen), $14.95. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR.

According to proponents of the face-value account, a beliefreport of the form ‘S believes that p’ is true just in case the agentbelieves a proposition referred to by the that-clause. As againstthis familiar view, I argue that there are cases of true beliefreports of the relevant form in which there is no proposition that thethat-clause, or the speaker using the that-clause, can plausibly betaken as referring to. Moreover, I argue that given the distinctiveway in which the face-value theory of belief-reports (...) fails, there ispressure to give up the metaphysical thesis that belief is apropositional attitude. I conclude by suggesting that we allownon-propositional entities to be amongst the relata of thebelief-relation, and make some speculative remarks concerning whatsuch entities might be like. (shrink)

We examined how the cultural dimension of universalism–particularism influences managers’ attitudes toward relational favoritism. Paradoxically, we found in a survey study that Brazilian and Chinese managers perceived more negative consequences of relational favoritism than did American managers—even though the Brazilians and the Chinese perceived stronger particularistic cultural norms in their countries than Americans did in the United States. We attribute this pattern of results to “cultural reflexivity”—the ability of people from transforming economies to be culturally self-critical during a period of (...) dramatic societal change. This pattern of results also emerged in a scenario study in which we asked these same Brazilian, Chinese, and American participants to assess managerial succession decisions made by a General Manager. We varied the scenarios so that the promoted manager was either a colleague with no pre-existing relation with the GM or a colleague who was a relative, a close friend, from the same town, or from the same school. Consistent with the results of the survey study, we found that perceived cultural norms of particularism were negatively related to perceptions of fairness. In other words, Brazilians and Chinese, even while living in more particularistic cultures, were more harsh in judging relational favoritism. We conclude with a discussion on the implications of these paradoxical relationships. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:178 Reviews c:\users\kenneth\documents\type3302\rj 33,2 113 red.docx 2014-01-15 10:04 THE EARLY MOORE AND RUSSELL Ray Perkins, Jr. Philosophy / Plymouth State U. Plymouth, nh 03264 1600, usa [email protected] G. E. Moore. Early Philosophical Writings. Edited and with an Introduction by Thomas Baldwin and Consuelo Preti. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge U. P., 2011. Pp. lxxxv, 251. isbn: 978-0521190145. £68.00; us$114.00. aldwin and Preti have put together a very nice book (...) which gives us G. E. Moore’s 1897 and 1898 Trinity College dissertations and an informative look at the historical context in which they were written. This story—including information about Moore’s early life, the philosophical influences at Cambridge and a critical commentary on his dissertations and readers’ reports— is clearly and carefully presented in their 78-page introduction.1 The book is a valuable addition to the history of analytic philosophy and will be of special interest to Moore (and Russell) scholars and to historians generally who wish to know more about the genesis of the ideas shaping the new analytic philosophy at the end of the century. Moore entered Trinity in 1892 to study classics. There he met Russell (who was in his third year) and took his advice to study philosophy in his last two years and take his final exams (Tripos, Part ii) in both disciplines, which he did successfully in 1896. And like Russell—who had won a Trinity prize fellowship in 1895 (with a dissertation on the foundations of geometry2 ) only one year after his graduation—he submitted a dissertation (1897) in hopes of winning a prize fellowship. Moore’s first attempt failed, but his 1898 version was successful. And not only did the success of the 1898 dissertation launch Moore’s career as a professional philosopher, it also paved the way for the new analytic philosophy of the next century. Moore’s dissertations and his Trinity examiners’ reports (by Caird, Sidgwick, Ward and Bosanquet3 ) are fascinating reading, and it’s a great convenience to have them handy in a single volume. But the editors deserve special 1 Hereafter I shall use the editors’ convention of referring to the pagination of their introduction with roman numerals and to Moore’s dissertations (plus examiners’ reports) with arabic numerals. 2 Russell’s dissertation was published in 1897 as An Essay on the Foundations of Geometry. 3 Edward Caird was an idealist and highly respected Kant scholar at Oxford. Henry Sidgwick was one of Moore’s teachers at Cambridge and author of the influential _= Reviews 179 c:\users\kenneth\documents\type3302\rj 33,2 113 red.docx 2014-01-15 10:04 praise for not only giving the reader an astute critical summary of the dissertations, but also for their skillful reconstruction of Moore’s surviving, but incomplete, 1898 manuscript from which parts of the early chapters had been removed. The editors make a good case (pp. lxxv–lxxix) that those pages became the basis of Moore’s 1899 Mind article, “The Nature of Judgment”. (Those familiar with Russell’s early work may recall it as an article that Russell claimed as of paramount importance for his own early work.4 I’ll return to the question of Russell and Moore and this article’s significance.) the dissertations, 1897 and 1898 Moore’s dissertations reveal a young Moore with remarkable powers of analysis and more than a hint of the careful, courageous scepticism and intellectual honesty for which he later became known. But as the editors make clear, their main importance is the record they reveal of the transition away from Kant and Hegel to the new philosophy, which put a premium on conceptual analysis and metaphysics without Kantian or neo-Hegelian idealism. The 1897 dissertation (“The Metaphysical Basis of Ethics”) is an analysis of the basic concepts of ethics with considerable critical discussion of Kant, especially concerning freedom and reason, and Moore’s attempt to fashion his own good-based ethics utilizing a little from Kant and much from Bradley (p. l). At this time both Moore and Russell were still under the influence of Kant... (shrink)

The expansion of livestock production throughout the world has led to increased demand for high protein animal feed. This expansion has created economic benefits for livestock farmers and other actors in the chain, but also resulted in environmental and social side effects. This study aims to identify a set of sustainability issues that cover the environmental, economic and social dimensions of soymeal and beef production chains. The method applied combines the results of multiple studies, including a literature review and stakeholder (...) surveys. Stakeholder surveys were conducted for three different interest groups and two geographical regions . Our results reveal that the selection of issues in most sustainability assessment studies is a relatively arbitrary decision, while the literature also states that identifying issues is an important step in a sustainability assessment. Defining sustainability issues from a whole chain perspective is important, as issues of sustainability emerge at various stages along the production chain, and are found to vary across stakeholders’ interests. Business stakeholders, for example, perceived economic issues to be more important, whereas the majority of consumer stakeholders and other stakeholders perceived social and environmental issues, respectively, to be more important. Different education levels, knowledge, and living patterns in various geographical regions can affect the stakeholders’ perceptions. The combination of a heterogeneous group of stakeholders and the consideration of multiple chain stages constitutes a useful approach to identify sustainability issues along food chains. (shrink)

Introduction 1. Perspectives on Wittgenstein: An Intermittently Opinionated Survey: Hans-Johann Glock. 2. Wittgenstein's Method: Ridding People of Philosophical Prejudices: Katherine Morris. 3. Gordon Baker's Late Interpretation of Wittgenstein: P. M. S. Hacker. 4. The Interpretation of the Philosophical Investigations: Style, Therapy, Nachlass: Alois Pichler. 5. Ways of Reading Wittgenstein: Observations on Certain Uses of the Word 'Metaphysics': Joachim Schulte. 6. Metaphysical/Everyday Use: A Note on a Late Paper by Gordon Baker: Hilary Putnam. 7. Wittgenstein and Transcendental Idealism: A. W. Moore. (...) 8. Simples and the Idea of Analysis in the Tractatus: Marie McGinn. 9. Words, Waxing and Waning: Ethics in/and/of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus: Stephen Mulhall. 10. The Uses of Wittgenstein's Beetle: Philosophical Investigations §293 and Its Interpreters: David G. Stern. 11. Bourgeois, Bolshevist or Anarchist?: The Reception of Wittgenstein's Philosophy of Mathematics: Ray Monk. 12. Wittgenstein and Ethical Naturalism: Alice Crary. (shrink)

Mitigating response distortion in answers to sensitive questions is an important issue for business ethics researchers. Sensitive questions may be asked in surveys related to business ethics, and respondents may intend to avoid exposing sensitive aspects of their character by answering such questions dishonestly, resulting in response distortion. Previous studies have provided evidence that a surveying procedure called the randomized response technique is useful for mitigating such distortion. However, previous studies have mainly applied the RRT to individual dichotomous questions in (...) face-to-face survey settings. In this study, we focus on behavioral research examining the relationships between latent variables, which are unobserved variables measured by multiple items on Likert or bipolar scales. To demonstrate how the RRT can be applied to obtain valid answers from respondents answering a self-administered online questionnaire with Likert and bipolar scales, we build a behavioral model to study the effect of punishment severity on employees’ attitudes toward misuse of information systems resources in the workplace, which in turn influence misuse behavior. The survey findings meet our expectations. The respondents are generally more willing to disclose sensitive data about their attitudes and actual behavior related to misuse when the RRT is implemented. The RRT’s implications for causal modeling and the advantages and challenges of its use in online environments are also discussed. (shrink)

Grice's (1957) analysis of non-natural meaning generated a huge industry, where new analyses were put forward to respond to successively more complex counterexamples. Davis (2003) offers a novel and refreshingly simple analysis of meaning in terms of the expression of belief, where (roughly) an agent expresses the belief that p just in case she performs a publicly observable action with the intention that it be an indication that she occurrently believes that p. I argue that Davis's analysis fails to capture (...) the essentially overt nature of our meaning-intentions, and with it, a plausible sufficient condition for meaning. (shrink)

Mary Midgley's book Utopias, Dolphins and Computers will be needed to recharge our more philosophical approach to life as new problems present themselves to humanity at an accelerated rate. The most dangerous attitude to these challenges, Midgley argues, is an anti-intellectualism that fails to see that all approaches presuppose tacit or hidden assumptions, that is a philosophy. One part of our tacit philosophy that is now breaking up is the social contract, according to Mary Midgley in Utopias, Dolphins and Computers (...) It needs tempering with a vision of people in relationships bordering on the organic—ideas with their roots in ecology—rather than as fundamentally isolated atoms in contractual union. (shrink)

Nematodes pervade Earth's biosphere and occupy innumerable ecological niches. The role of Caenorhabditis elegans as a model for developmental processes has encouraged us to cultivate a second nematode, Pristionchus pacificus, as a comparative counterpoint to address questions in development, behavior and ecology in nematode evolution. We hope that this endeavor, now more than a decade underway, will allow us to project findings onto other comparative models for biological processes. To this end, our laboratory has made an extensive genetic map and (...) mutant screens to understand changes in developmental programs. Recently, we have been capitalizing on the whole genome sequence of P. pacificus to describe more thoroughly the molecular basis for these changes, as well as to better integrate our molecular knowledge with the biodiversity of Pristionchus species. BioEssays 28: 651–659, 2006. © 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:A FAOT ABOUT THE VIRTUES A. CHADWICK RAY Oentrai OoUege Peila, Iowa PHILIPPA FOOT remarks in Virtues and Vices that "with the nota;ble exception of Peter Gea;ch hardly 100.yone sees ·any difficulty in the thought that virtues may sometimes be di·splayed in bald ructions." 1 That a man may use his courage to deplorable ends; that 'a tea.ah.er ma.y show charity in igiving a miudent undeserved credit-these seem to (...) ibe hardly problema.tic possibilities. Yet Aquinas upholds •a definition of morrul virtue as " a good quality o[ the mind, by which we live rightly, of whioh no one cain make bad use,..."2 And Aristotle's conception of the man Ol:f p:riactica:l reason as the standard of moral virtue likewise seems to p!'lec1ude a virtue 's being misused.3 Times change, and rupparently eV'en virtue is not what it used to be. Nevertheless I mean here to survey the resour.ces of moral psyichology in the tradition of.Airistotle to see what sort of grounding can be found for the no-bad-use thesis. Presumably Geach stamds wlmost 1 afone today on this question, because the more traditional view would seem defensible only if it is taken as analytic. We could stipulate that an action wilil be called virtuous only if on balance it is the wisest alternative aivaifaible to the agent, but the utility of such a l Philippa Foot, Virtues and Vices (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), 15. In After Virtue (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981), 216, Macintyre finds Hume, Kant, Mill, and Rawls taking virtues as dispositions to conform to certain rules. To the extent that rules are unreliable, the virtues will be too. 2 Aquinas, Summa theoiogiae, I-II, q.55, a.4. a Aristotle, Nioomaohean Flthios 1106b36-7a2, 1113a30-31. 430 A. CHADWICK RAY concept would be doubtfrnl, and 'virtue' would seem to name no real thing. The'1'e are, after aH, appwrently anomalous cases, as wihen a teacher is moved to indulgence by an undeserving student's plea and seems to show kindness to a fault. The deifense oif the no-bad-use thesis requires us to deny that real kindness is shown here. But if no better justification for the denia~ can be offered than that the action is wrong and so cannot be virtuous, the thesis wil:l express only an a11bitrary decision about how to use 'virtue ' and related terms. But if such deni1als can he justified by appeal to facts about human nature, then the no.:brud-use thesis itself may perhaps be taken a;s descriptive of certain realities constitutive of human life. After considel'ing some of the conditions of vir:tuous action and the possibility of degrees of virtue (section III), I shaill argue (IV and V) that the opening sentence of Aristotle 's Nicomachean Ethics affords a bctua:l ba;sis for sustaining the no-had-use thesis as descriptive of virtues as we find them; that if "every action and pursuit, is thought to aim at some good " is perhaps an overstatement, still the humanness and intelligibility of an action would seem to depend on its aiming at some good; and that it is largely by trying to consider actions independently of the goods they aim a;t that we imagine virtues able to se1we unworthy ends. Payffig fuH rega11d to the purposiveness of human action and the desires expressed in it will also make it possible (VI) to avnid oonoluding with Aristotle that the virtues are inseparable from eaich other. I conclude (VII) with some brief refteetion on the meaning of my departures from Aristotle. Before offering my own interpretation of the Aristotelian resources, though, I briefly contend for the reality of moral virtues (as tiraditiona1ly understood ) against conventioIJJa1ist interpretations ('section I) and then (H) consider an ailtemative account (roughly Geach's) of the nature of the virtues that would sa¥e the no-bad-use thesis. A FACT ABOUT THE VIRTUES 431 I. Virtues as Teleological Di8}Jositions Why indeed speak of vi1rtues at a1l? Behavior would seem to be describahle and e:x:p1a... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:A FAOT ABOUT THE VIRTUES A. CHADWICK RAY Oentrai OoUege Peila, Iowa PHILIPPA FOOT remarks in Virtues and Vices that "with the nota;ble exception of Peter Gea;ch hardly 100.yone sees ·any difficulty in the thought that virtues may sometimes be di·splayed in bald ructions." 1 That a man may use his courage to deplorable ends; that 'a tea.ah.er ma.y show charity in igiving a miudent undeserved credit-these seem to (...) ibe hardly problema.tic possibilities. Yet Aquinas upholds •a definition of morrul virtue as " a good quality o[ the mind, by which we live rightly, of whioh no one cain make bad use,..."2 And Aristotle's conception of the man Ol:f p:riactica:l reason as the standard of moral virtue likewise seems to p!'lec1ude a virtue 's being misused.3 Times change, and rupparently eV'en virtue is not what it used to be. Nevertheless I mean here to survey the resour.ces of moral psyichology in the tradition of.Airistotle to see what sort of grounding can be found for the no-bad-use thesis. Presumably Geach stamds wlmost 1 afone today on this question, because the more traditional view would seem defensible only if it is taken as analytic. We could stipulate that an action wilil be called virtuous only if on balance it is the wisest alternative aivaifaible to the agent, but the utility of such a l Philippa Foot, Virtues and Vices (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), 15. In After Virtue (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981), 216, Macintyre finds Hume, Kant, Mill, and Rawls taking virtues as dispositions to conform to certain rules. To the extent that rules are unreliable, the virtues will be too. 2 Aquinas, Summa theoiogiae, I-II, q.55, a.4. a Aristotle, Nioomaohean Flthios 1106b36-7a2, 1113a30-31. 430 A. CHADWICK RAY concept would be doubtfrnl, and 'virtue' would seem to name no real thing. The'1'e are, after aH, appwrently anomalous cases, as wihen a teacher is moved to indulgence by an undeserving student's plea and seems to show kindness to a fault. The deifense oif the no-bad-use thesis requires us to deny that real kindness is shown here. But if no better justification for the denia~ can be offered than that the action is wrong and so cannot be virtuous, the thesis wil:l express only an a11bitrary decision about how to use 'virtue ' and related terms. But if such deni1als can he justified by appeal to facts about human nature, then the no.:brud-use thesis itself may perhaps be taken a;s descriptive of certain realities constitutive of human life. After considel'ing some of the conditions of vir:tuous action and the possibility of degrees of virtue (section III), I shaill argue (IV and V) that the opening sentence of Aristotle 's Nicomachean Ethics affords a bctua:l ba;sis for sustaining the no-had-use thesis as descriptive of virtues as we find them; that if "every action and pursuit, is thought to aim at some good " is perhaps an overstatement, still the humanness and intelligibility of an action would seem to depend on its aiming at some good; and that it is largely by trying to consider actions independently of the goods they aim a;t that we imagine virtues able to se1we unworthy ends. Payffig fuH rega11d to the purposiveness of human action and the desires expressed in it will also make it possible (VI) to avnid oonoluding with Aristotle that the virtues are inseparable from eaich other. I conclude (VII) with some brief refteetion on the meaning of my departures from Aristotle. Before offering my own interpretation of the Aristotelian resources, though, I briefly contend for the reality of moral virtues (as tiraditiona1ly understood ) against conventioIJJa1ist interpretations ('section I) and then (H) consider an ailtemative account (roughly Geach's) of the nature of the virtues that would sa¥e the no-bad-use thesis. A FACT ABOUT THE VIRTUES 431 I. Virtues as Teleological Di8}Jositions Why indeed speak of vi1rtues at a1l? Behavior would seem to be describahle and e:x:p1a... (shrink)

Ray splitting is a universal phenomenon that occurs with appreciable amplitude in all wave systems when the properties of the system change on a scale smaller than the wave length. We study the quantum implications of ray splitting theoretically and experimentally with the help of ray-splitting billiards in one and two dimensions. We show that Gutzwiller's trace formula works even in the context of ray-splitting systems provided reflection and transmission of waves at ray-splitting boundaries is properly included.

We examine the question of how many Boolean algebras, distinct up to isomorphism, that are quotients of the powerset of the naturals by Borel ideals, can be proved to exist in ZFC alone. The maximum possible value is easily seen to be the cardinality of the continuum $2^{\aleph_{0}}$ ; earlier work by Ilijas Farah had shown that this was the value in models of Martin's Maximum or some similar forcing axiom, but it was open whether there could be fewer in (...) models of the Continuum Hypothesis. We develop and apply a new technique for constructing many ideals whose quotients must be nonisomorphic in any model of ZFC. The technique depends on isolating a kind of ideal, called shallow, that can be distinguished from the ideal of all finite sets even after any isomorphic embedding, and then piecing together various copies of the ideal of all finite sets using distinct shallow ideals. In this way we are able to demonstrate that there are continuum-many distinct quotients by Borel ideals, indeed by analytic P-ideals, and in fact that there is in an appropriate sense a Borel embedding of the Vitali equivalence relation into the equivalence relation of isomorphism of quotients by analytic P-ideals. We also show that there is an uncountable definable wellordered collection of Borel ideals with distinct quotients. (shrink)

(http://philpapers.org/profile/112741 )[http://www.academia.edu/7765592 ] :"When Shakespeare was writing 'The Merchant of Venice', most people believed that the sun went round the earth. They were taught that this was a divinely ordered scheme of things, and that -in England- God had instituted a Church and ordained a Monarchy for the right government of the land and the populace. 'The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.'- L.P.Hartley. ".

Stephen Schiffer has argued that natural languages do not have compositional semantics. But it has been widely held that compositional semantics is required in order to explain how it is possible that we have the linguistic capacities that we do. In particular, our use of natural languages is productive in the sense that there are indefinitely many sentences that we have never heard or considered before, but which we are nonetheless capable of understanding. How is this possible? Compositionality evidently supplies (...) a clear answer to that question, because it guarantees that there is some way of determining the meaning of each sentence of the language from a fixed and finite base of semantic value assignments. This poses a serious challenge to Schiffer's negative thesis. -/- Schiffer proposes to answer this challenge in a way that will also provide a solution to the language-relation problem. This is the problem of specifying what relation must obtain between a population P and a language L in order for L to be a language of P. Schiffer's strategy is to reduce the problem for public languages to that of specifying the language-relation for languages of thought-specifying what it is to think in a language. -/- I will show in a precise way that Schiffer has neither met the productivity challenge nor solved the language-relation problem. Using Schiffer's characterization of what it is to think in a language, I show that if an agent thinks in some language L, then there is an infinity of languages that the agent also thinks in with the very same sentence tokens, but with arbitrarily different meanings. Thus, Schiffer has clearly not given a sufficient condition for an agent to think in a language, and Schiffer cannot do with less than a sufficient condition. Moreover, I will argue that Schiffer cannot avail himself of various attempts in the literature to address similar problems. (shrink)

The paper develops a view of interpretative cultural practice as a complex system of dynamically changing constituents which stand in definite relations to one another. These constituents are the Object of Interpretation (O), Result of Interpretation or interpretation itself (I), the Process of interpretation (P) and the interpreting Subject (S). It is argued that if such a view as this is adapted, ‘singularism’ as a norm for cultural practices necessarily gives way to ‘multiplism’. Singularism and multiplism are terms used by (...) Michael Krausz in Rightness and Reasons (1993). Krausz also talks of certain interpretative practices as imputational, in the sense that the object of interpretation changes, is ‘imputed upon’ during the course of the practice. This paper contends that all cultural practices are imputalional, for each such practice leaves its effect on the object. Not only does practice affect the object, but it affects the subject too The evolution of the subject, the self, through imputational interpretative cultural practices is explored as a major element in the making of a human individual. (shrink)

In 1920, the eminent British astronomer and scientist Sir Arthur Eddington proclaimed that “Albert Einstein has provoked a revolution of thought in physical science” (p. vii). The preceding 15 years had seen historic scientific advances in three fields: quantum theory, relativistic kinematics, and gravitation. The genius of Einstein (1879–1955) had been perhaps the most important element in the early development of these fields. The year 1905 is often said to be Einstein's “annus mirabilis” ‐ a truly miraculous year in which (...) he published some 25 scientific articles including not only the landmark paper introducing the special theory of relativity, but also some quite remarkable contributions to quantum theory (see, e.g., Lanczos 1974, preface). By 1918, Einstein had extended the ideas involved in relativity to the problem of gravitation, and had laid the foundations for some astonishing discoveries in cosmology, with recent research into black holes and the big bang owing much to his pioneering work on the large‐scale structure of the universe. Einstein had a tremendous and lasting influence on the scientific community; but he also captured the public imagination ‐ and the attention of many leading twentieth‐century philosophers. (shrink)