Important study focuses on the revival and assimilation of ancient Greek mathematics in the 13th–16th centuries, via Arabic science, and the 16th-century development of symbolic algebra. This brought about the crucial change in the concept of number that made possible modern science — in which the symbolic "form" of a mathematical statement is completely inseparable from its "content" of physical meaning. Includes a translation of Vieta's Introduction to the Analytical Art. 1968 edition. Bibliography.

Personal authenticity is out of fashion amongst analytic philosophers. Yet, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Sartre and Camus were clearly preoccupied by its theoretical and practical viability. In this study, Jacob Golomb illuminates the writings of these philosophers in an attempt to explain their particular ethical stance on the subject. This book will prove invaluable reading for students and teachers of philosophy, literature and education and indeed for anyone who has ever empathized with Camus's Meursault, Sartre's Matthieu or Nietzsche's Zarathustra.

This volume is a study of the relationship between philosophy and faith in Søren Kierkegaard's Philosophical Fragments. It is also the first book to examine the role of Socrates in this body of writings, illuminating the significance of Socrates for Kierkegaard's thought. Jacob Howland argues that in the Fragments, philosophy and faith are closely related passions. A careful examination of the role of Socrates demonstrates that Socratic, philosophical eros opens up a path to faith. At the same time, the (...) work of faith - which holds the self together with that which transcends it - is essentially erotic in the Socratic sense of the term. Chapters on Kierkegaard's Johannes Climacus and on Plato's Apology shed light on the Socratic character of the pseudonymous author of the Fragments and the role of 'the god' in Socrates' pursuit of wisdom. Howland also analyzes the Concluding Unscientific Postscript and Kierkegaard's reflections on Socrates and Christ. (shrink)

This article argues that Epictetus employs the terms orexis and hormê in the same manner as the older Stoics. It then shows, on the basis of this claim, that the older Stoics recognized a distinction between dispositional and occurrent forms of motivation. On this account of Stoic theory, intentional action is in each instance the product of two forms of cognition: a value ascription that attributes goodness or badness to some object, conceiving of its possession as beneficial or harmful to (...) the agent, together with a situational judgment about appropriate action. The resulting interpretation suggests that the Stoic theory of motivation as a whole — and not merely the Stoic analysis of the pathê — has the basic shape of a practical syllogism, with more psychological depth than commentators have recognized. (shrink)

I argue that comparisons of Stoic virtue to stochastic skills — now standard in the secondary literature on Stoicism — are based on a misreading of the sources and distort the Stoic position in two respects. In paradigmatic stochastic skills such as archery, medicine, or navigation the value of the skill’s external end justifies the existence and practice of the skill and constitutes an appropriate focus of rational motivation. Neither claim applies to virtue as the Stoics understand it. The stochastic (...) model of virtue almost certainly originated with Carneades and should be distinguished clearly from the Stoic account. Doing so clarifies the Stoic position and shows that it anticipates what Thomas Hurka calls a modern view of value. (shrink)

"Jacob Howland's book is an engaging, readable, and extremely suggestive addition to the literature on Plato's magnum opus." --Ancient Philosophy.

Nietzsche, the Godfather of Fascism? What can Nietzsche have in common with this murderous ideology? Frequently described as the "radical aristocrat" of the spirit, Nietzsche abhorred mass culture and strove to cultivate an Übermensch endowed with exceptional mental qualities. What can such a thinker have in common with the fascistic manipulation of the masses for chauvinistic goals that crushed the autonomy of the individual? The question that lies at the heart of this collection is how Nietzsche came to acquire the (...) deadly "honor" of being considered the philosopher of the Third Reich and whether such claims had any justification. Does it make any sense to hold him in some way responsible for the horrors of Auschwitz? The editors present a range of views that attempt to do justice to the ambiguity and richness of Nietzsche's thought. First-rate contributions by a variety of distinguished philosophers and historians explore in depth Nietzsche's attitudes toward Jews, Judaism, Christianity, anti-Semitism, and National Socialism. They interrogate Nietzsche's writings for fascist and anti-Semitic proclivities and consider how they were read by fascists who claimed Nietzsche as their intellectual godfather. There is much that is disturbingly antiegalitarian and antidemocratic in Nietzsche, and his writings on Jews are open to differing interpretations. Yet his emphasis on individualism and contempt for German nationalism and anti-Semitism put him at stark odds with Nazi ideology. The Nietzsche that emerges here is a tragic prophet of the spiritual vacuum that produced the twentieth century's totalitarian movements, the thinker who best diagnosed the pathologies of fin-de-siècle European culture. Nietzsche dared to look into the abyss of modern nihilism. This book tells us what he found. The contributors are Menahem Brinker, Daniel W. Conway, Stanley Corngold, Kurt Rudolf Fischer, Jacob Golomb, Robert C. Holub, Berel Lang, Wolfgang Müller-Lauter, Alexander Nehamas, David Ohana, Roderick Stackelberg, Mario Sznajder, Geoffrey Waite, Robert S. Wistrich, and Yirmiyahu Yovel. (shrink)

In engaging five of Plato's dialogues—Theaetetus, Euthyphro, Cratylus, Sophist, and Statesman—and by paying particular attention to Socrates' intellectual defense in the "philosophic trial" by the Stranger from Elea, Jacob Howland illuminates Plato's understanding of the proper relationship between philosophy and politics. This insightful and innovative study illustrates the Plato's understanding of the difference between sophistry and philosophy, and it identifies the innate contradictions of political philosophy that Plato observed and remain entrenched within the field to this day. This is (...) essential reading for anyone interested in the past, present, and future of political philosophy. (shrink)

In 1997 and 1998, the American secular philosopher Richard Rorty published a set of predictions about the twenty-first century ranging from the years 2014-95. He predicted, for instance, the election of a "strong man" in the 2016 presidential race and the proliferation of gun violence starting in 2014. He labels the years from 2014-44 the darkest years of American history, politics, and society. From 2045-95, Rorty thinks his own vision for "social hope" will be implemented within American society--a vision that (...) includes charity (in the Pauline sense), solidarity, and sympathy. Rorty considers himself a leftist, liberal, and a philosopher of hope. So why would a philosopher of hope predict such darkness and despair? In The Dark Years? Philosophy, Politics, and the Problem of Predictions philosopher and political theorist Jacob L. Goodson explains the fullness of Rorty's predictions, the problem of making predictions within the social sciences, and the reasons why even Rorty's vision for life after the "dark years" fails us on the standards of hope. Goodson argues that we ought to challenge the monopoly that American politics has as our object of hope. Goodson makes the case for a melancholic yet redemptive hope. -- back cover. (shrink)

Background: Ontologies and taxonomies are among the most important computational resources for molecular biology and bioinformatics. A series of recent papers has shown that the Gene Ontology (GO), the most prominent taxonomic resource in these fields, is marked by flaws of certain characteristic types, which flow from a failure to address basic ontological principles. As yet, no methods have been proposed which would allow ontology curators to pinpoint flawed terms or definitions in ontologies in a systematic way. Results: We present (...) computational methods that automatically identify terms and definitions which are defined in a circular or unintelligible way. We further demonstrate the potential of these methods by applying them to isolate a subset of 6001 problematic GO terms. By automatically aligning GO with other ontologies and taxonomies we were able to propose alternative synonyms and definitions for some of these problematic terms. This allows us to demonstrate that these other resources do not contain definitions superior to those supplied by GO. Conclusion: Our methods provide reliable indications of the quality of terms and definitions in ontologies and taxonomies. Further, they are well suited to assist ontology curators in drawing their attention to those terms that are ill-defined. We have further shown the limitations of ontology mapping and alignment in assisting ontology curators in rectifying problems, thus pointing to the need for manual curation. (shrink)

As the World Anti-Doping Code is up for revision, the paper proposes a framework for reading the Code based on a relatively literal approach and an almost exclusive focus on the ?spirit of sport? as a key element of the Code. The author argues that this single element can contribute to revealing the underlying rationale of the Code, as it serves to justify bans of doping substances and methods, in some cases without recurring to evidence sustaining the claims made. For (...) a substance/method to be banned, the Code requires that two out of three criteria be met: performance enhancement, health risk and the spirit of sport. The paper demonstrates how these provisions link to other parts of the Code, (under the rules of the Code 2009) in the absence of performance-enhancing properties combined with a health risk. The paper draws implications from these findings regarding terminological (im)precision, legal certainty/predictability, transparency/accountability, limits to arbitrary exercise of power and internal/external validity. (shrink)

Iris Marion Young articulated a social connection model of responsibility to conceptualize political responsibility for structural injustice. Schiff argues that actually confronting our responsibility is problematic: the pervasiveness of structural injustice makes it difficult to acknowledge as a problem, while distances between sufferers and contributors complicate our acknowledgment of social connection. These problems are exacerbated by thoughtlessness, bad faith, and misrecognition. Narrative can facilitate the acknowledgment necessary for us to confront our political responsibility.

By way of introduction I want first to distinguish between several types of pluralism; then I want to consider more closely the pluralism of norms and values in order to formulate, finally, the problem that is central to this essay, the problem of particular versus universal norms.

Using video recordings of draft meetings conducted as part of an intramural basketball program as data, this conversation analytic study examines the use of an incomplete utterance in a joint evaluative activity. In particular, we focus on how the participants, volunteer coaches, who meet to draft players for their respective teams, produce a syntactically incomplete utterance as a means to critically assess a player, a non-present third party to the interaction. Analysis reveals that the participants use an incomplete utterance as (...) part of dispreferred design; it allows them to withhold articulating overt criticism of others. By trailing off where the criticism is due, the participants display reluctance to verbalize what is to be said and treat its articulation as delicate. The syntactic structure of the utterance that includes a contrastive conjunction and accompanying embodied actions such as head shakes help them convey a critical stance. We examine the use of incomplete utterances in both agreement and disagreement sequences; the recipients display their unproblematic understanding of the critical assessment and respond by providing their own assessments that either affiliate or disaffiliate with the conveyed critical stance. (shrink)

This article examines the history of cybernetics in France, and the history of French cybernetics in the context of the emergent field of the history of cybernetics. Drawing upon an unfamiliar group of intellectuals and sources, I discuss the way in which French cybernetics was not primarily the hyper-philosophical strain we have come to associate with names such as Derrida and Lévi-Strauss, but an approach to thinking through political and social problems that some on the left would even deign to (...) call pragmatic. In particular, I follow a group of intellectuals known as the Groupe des dix, who, in the aftermath of the tumult of May ‘68, formed an interdisciplinary think tank to try to work out how to bridge the gap between science and society. In order to facilitate conversations between politicians, philosophers, biologists, and sociologists (to name just a few of the represented disciplines), the Groupe reached for a language that was supposed to be truly omnidisciplinary: that of cybernetics. And they did so in a country where cybernetics was not properly represented as a laboratory science. On this last point, this paper makes an addition to the history of cybernetics by offering a portrait not of cybernetics in action, but of cybernetics in vulgarization. Not that the Groupe would not make their own stamp on politics: Several of them still hold significant power in adjudicating the role of science and technology in the public sphere in the French state. (shrink)

There has been a growing concern over establishing norms that ensure the ethically acceptable and scientifically sound conduct of clinical trials. Among the leading norms internationally are the World Medical Association's Declaration of Helsinki, guidelines by the Council for International Organizations of Medical Sciences, the International Conference on Harmonization's standards for industry, and the CONSORT group's reporting norms, in addition to the influential U.S. Federal Common Rule, Food and Drug Administration's body of regulations, and information sheets by the Department of (...) Health and Human Services. There are also many norms published at more local levels by official agencies and professional groups.Any account of international standards should cover both scientific and ethical norms at once – the two are conceptually intertwined. Recent sources recognize that “[s]cientifically unsound research on human subjects is unethical in that it exposes research subjects to risks without possible benefit.”. (shrink)

Great philosophers such as Kierkegaard, Nietzsche and Sartre have clearly been preoccupied by the possibility of authenticity. In this study, Jacob Golomb looks closely at the literature and writings of these philosophers in his analysis of their ethics. Golomb's writings shows his passionate commitment to the quest for the authenticity - particularly in our climate of post-modern scepticism. He argues that existentialism is all the more pertinent and relevant today when set against the general disillusionment which characterises the late (...) twentieth century. This book is invaluable reading for those who have been fascinated by figures like Camus's Meursault, Sartre's Matthieu and Nietzsche's Zarathustra. (shrink)

Nietzsche's ideas were widely disseminated among and appropriated by the first Hebrew Zionist writers and leaders. It seems quite appropriate, then, that the first Zionist Congress was held in Basle, where Nietzsche spent several years as a professor of classical philology. This coincidence gains profound significance when we see Nietzsche's impact on the first Zionist leaders and writers in Europe as well as his presence in Palestine and, later, in the State of Israel.--from the Introduction The early Zionists were deeply (...) concerned with the authenticity of the modern Jew qua person and with the content and direction of the reawakening Hebrew culture. Nietzsche too was propagating his highest ideal of a personal authenticity. Yet the affinities in their thought, and the formative impact of Nietzsche on the first leaders and writers of the Zionist movement, have attracted very little attention from intellectual historians. Indeed, the antisemitic uses to which Nietzsche's thought was turned after his death have led most commentators to assume the philosopher's antipathy to Jewish aspirations. Jacob Golomb proposes a Nietzsche whose sympathies overturn such preconceptions and details for the first time how Nietzsche's philosophy inspired Zionist leaders, ideologues, and writers to create a modern Hebrew culture. Golomb cites Ahad Ha'am, Micha Josef Berdichevski, Martin Buber, Theodor Herzl, Max Nordau, and Hillel Zeitlin as examples of Zionists who dared to look into Nietzsche's abyss. This book tells us what they found. --Allan Arkush, author of Moses Mendelssohn and the Enlightenment "Jerusalem Post". (shrink)

Iris Marion Young articulated a social connection model of responsibility to conceptualize political responsibility for structural injustice. Schiff argues that actually confronting our responsibility is problematic: the pervasiveness of structural injustice makes it difficult to acknowledge as a problem, while distances between sufferers and contributors complicate our acknowledgment of social connection. These problems are exacerbated by thoughtlessness, bad faith, and misrecognition. Narrative can facilitate the acknowledgment necessary for us to confront our political responsibility.

kerekh 1. ha-Ṭov ṿeha-raʻ -- kerekh 2. Maḥshavah ṿe-shirah (2 v.).

Great philosophers such as Kierkegaard, Nietzsche and Sartre have clearly been preoccupied by the possibility of authenticity. In this study, Jacob Golomb looks closely at the literature and writings of these philosophers in his analysis of their ethics. Golomb's writings shows his passionate commitment to the quest for the authenticity - particularly in our climate of post-modern scepticism. He argues that existentialism is all the more pertinent and relevant today when set against the general disillusionment which characterises the late (...) twentieth century. This book is invaluable reading for those who have been fascinated by figures like Camus's Meursault, Sartre's Matthieu and Nietzsche's Zarathustra. (shrink)

Great philosophers such as Kierkegaard, Nietzsche and Sartre have clearly been preoccupied by the possibility of authenticity. In this study, Jacob Golomb looks closely at the literature and writings of these philosophers in his analysis of their ethics. Golomb's writings shows his passionate commitment to the quest for the authenticity - particularly in our climate of post-modern scepticism. He argues that existentialism is all the more pertinent and relevant today when set against the general disillusionment which characterises the late (...) twentieth century. This book is invaluable reading for those who have been fascinated by figures like Camus's Meursault, Sartre's Matthieu and Nietzsche's Zarathustra. (shrink)

clusions are only probably correct. On the other hand, algorithmic information theory provides a precise mathematical definition of the notion of random or patternless sequence. In this paper we shall describe conditions under which if the sequence of coin tosses in the Solovay– Strassen and Miller–Rabin algorithms is replaced by a sequence of heads and tails that is of maximal algorithmic information content, i.e., has maximal algorithmic randomness, then one obtains an error-free test for primality. These results are only of (...) theoretical interest, since it is a manifestation of the G¨ odel incompleteness phenomenon that it is impossible to “certify” a sequence to be random by means of a proof, even though most sequences have this property. Thus by using certified random sequences one can in principle, but not in practice, convert probabilistic tests for primality into deterministic ones. (shrink)

The legacy of the massacre which intervened during the XX Olympic Summer Games in Munich (26 August to 11 September 1972) is a heavy burden for Munich, Bavaria and Germany and one which continues b...

We analyse the way in which the Holocaust is taught in The Netherlands, with an emphasis on critically examining the content of secondary school textbooks used to teach Dutch students about the history of the Holocaust. We also interview Dutch educators, government officials and academics about the state of Dutch Holocaust education. Our findings indicate that Dutch students are underexposed to the Holocaust and lack basic knowledge and conceptual understanding of it. Fundamental concerns regarding the civic obligations of citizens in (...) a democracy and basic principles of human rights that are raised by the history of the Holocaust in The Netherlands are often ignored or examined superficially, sometimes because of ambivalence about the extent of Dutch involvement in the genocide of Dutch Jewry. Little attention is paid to the complex moral choices that Dutch citizens faced during the Second World War and the life-or-death implications such decisions had for Dutch Jews. Finally, Jewish history and culture and the history of European anti-Semitism are rarely addressed in textbooks and history lessons about the Holocaust, undermining efforts to sensitise students to the implications of the Holocaust for The Netherlands and for Europe as a whole. In our conclusion, we offer some models of Holocaust education that could significantly improve the quality and content of Dutch Holocaust education. (shrink)

Leo Strauss’ ubiquitous presence in recent US foreign policy debates demands a thorough analysis of his critique of liberalism. I identify and explain a previously unnoticed transformation in that critique. Strauss’ Weimar critique of liberalism was philosophical and political; like Carl Schmitt, he sought philosophical grounds to replace liberalism with an authoritarian political system. However, post-emigration Strauss abandoned this political agenda, exclusively pursuing a philosophical critique that exposed modern liberalism’s purported weaknesses in order to strengthen its core. I accentuate this (...) change by reading Strauss’ postwar lecture, ‘The Three Waves of Modernity’, as an implicit response to and reconstruction of Schmitt’s ‘Neutralizations and Depoliticizations’ essay. Strauss’ changing relationship to political theology and political philosophy was central to his transformation: while a philosophically grounded political theology undergirded his early disdain for liberalism, Strauss later abandoned political theology for a quasi-theological faith in political philosophy that motivated his more moderate, philosophical critique. (shrink)

Early-Modern Irish Catholics exiled on the European continent are known to have often held prominent academic positions in various important colleges and universities. This paper investigates the hitherto unknown Scholastic legacy of the Dublin-born Jesuit John Austin (1717–84), a famous Irish educator who started his career teaching philosophy at the Jesuit college of Rheims in 1746–47, before returning to the country of his birth as part of the Irish Mission. These manuscript lecture notes provides us first-hand knowledge about the content (...) of French Jesuit education in the middle of the eighteenth century, which does not correspond to its classical reputation of ‘Aristotelian’ scholasticism opposed to philosophical novelties. While stitching to a traditional way of teaching, Austin introduces positively elements from Descartes, Malebranche, Locke and Newton into the curriculum. The present paper focuses on his conception of philosophical certitude (certitudo), which he considered a necessary condition for the possibility of philosophical knowledge. (shrink)

With its answers to questions such as What is time? and What is space?, this clear, nontechnical treatment makes the principles of relativity more accessible to the general reader. The author gradually introduces Einstein's theory in terms of familiar concepts from high school-level geometry, utilizing more than 60 drawings to illuminate profound yet often simple ideas.