The concept of potential plays a prominent role in the thinking of parents, educators and planners the world over. Although this concept accurately reflects central features of human nature, its current use perpetuates traditional myths of fixity, harmony and value, calculated to cause untold mischief in social and educational practice. First published in 1985, Israel Scheffler's book aims to demythologise the concept of potential. He shows its roots in genuine aspects of human nature, but at the same time frees (...) it from outworn philosophical myths by means of analytical reconstruction - thereby improving both its theoretical and its practical applicability. The book concludes with an interpretation of policy-making in education, and reflections on the ideal education of a policy-maker. It emphasises human symbolism, choice, temporal continuity, and self-determination as indispensible elements of any adequate philosophy of education. _Of Human Potential _will be of interest to a broad range of philosophers, educators and social scientists. (shrink)

In the wake of the Scientific Revolution, the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries saw the complete demolition of traditional structures of authority, scientific thought, and belief by the new philosophy and the philosophes, including Voltaire, Diderot, and Rousseau. The Radical Enlightenment played a part in this revolutionary process, which effectively overthrew all justification for monarchy, aristocracy, and ecclesiastical power, as well as man's dominance over woman, theological dominance of education, and slavery. Despite the present day interest in the revolutions of (...) the eighteenth century, the origins and rise of the Radical Enlightenment have received limited scholarly attention. The greatest obstacle to the movement finding its proper place in modern historical writing is its international scope: the Racial Enlightenment was not French, British, German, Italian, Jewish or Dutch, but all of these at the same time. In this wide-ranging volume, Jonathan Israel offers a novel interpretation of the Radical Enlightenment down to La Mettie and Diderot, two of its key exponents. Particular emphasis is placed on the pivotal role of Spinoza and the widespread underground international philosophical movement known before 1750 as Spinozism. (shrink)

The Bohm-Bub hidden-variable theory is able to predict the results of measuring a quantum system only in the special case where the set of commuting observables being measured is complete. To handle the much more common case where the set is incomplete, Tutsch has proposed a generalization of the Bohm-Bub model. Unfortunately, as we show here, Tutsch's original method does not yield the correct quantum mechanical transition probabilities. On the other hand, Belinfante's modification of Tutsch's method does yield the correct (...) probabilities, and it gives a satisfactory hidden-variable theory of partial measurement for the case where one or more commuting variable(s) are measured at a single space-time point. In the case where the variables are measured at different space-time points, the theory is inadequate, due to the fact that it is not relativistically covariant, and does not take relaxation of the hidden variables into account. (shrink)

A theorem on the extendability of certain subsets of a Boolean algebra to ultrafilters which preserve countably many infinite meets (generalizing Rasiowa-Sikorski) is used to pinpoint the mechanism of the Barwise proof in a way which bypasses the set theoretical elaborations.

The present note is a reworking and streamlining of Daigneault and Monk's Representation Theory for Polyadic Algebras. MSC: 03G15.

We present a simple first step toward a relativistically covariant generalization of the Bohm-Bub hidden-variable theory. The model is applicable to spin measurement on a single Dirac particle and describes the collapse of the state vector to a spin-up or spin-down state. The essential postulate is that the hidden-variable vector transforms in the same way as the state vector under a Lorentz transformation. This yields a covariant collapse equation, which reduces to the ordinary Bohm-Bub equation for an observer stationary with (...) respect to the particle and shows a time dilated collapse for a moving observer. The model yields the correct quantum transition probabilities for all observers. (shrink)

Objectivity Under Attack: a fundamental feature of science is its ideal of objectivity, an ideal that subjects ...