A contribution to ongoing debates in the philosophy of science, aiming to reconceptualize the orientation of the subject. Mobilizing the literature, the authors seek to transform their insights into a new epistemological and ontological basis for studying the enterprise of science.

Este artículo ofrece un significativo aspecto nuevo según el cual el pensamiento de Newton se arraiga en el hermetismo y en la tradición de la sabiduría antigua. Por primera vez hace uso de importantes manuscritos que avalan la participación de Newton en la sabiduría antigua. Newton consideró seriamente incluir este material en el Libro III de los Principia, es decir, el argumento de la gravitación universal.

In this essay, we discuss how Descartes arrives at his mature view of material causation. Descartes’ position changes over time in some very radical ways. The last section spells out his final position as to how causation works in the world of material objects. When considering Descartes’ causal theories, it is useful to distinguish between ‘vertical’ and ‘horizontal’ causation. The vertical perspective addresses God’s relation to creation. God is essential being, and every being other than God depends upon God in (...) order to exist and to continue in existence.Thus, from the vertical perspective, the act of creating and fact of coming into existence are co-extensive notions. This metaphysical/theological framework is the basis of Descartes’ commitment to three interrelated notions: that genuine causes and effects occur simultaneously; that causing is appropriately the case only when the cause is acting; and the view that God is the efficient, total, and continuous cause of everything that exists and every action that occurs. So from the vertical perspective, things are nothing without God’s continuous creation, and there is a problem in articulating how they are said to have independent being and causal efficacy. It is in terms of these commitments that Descartes’ views on horizontal, or material, causation must be approached. We will make apparent the radical extent to which his account of intra-worldly causation abandons his earlier and more traditional views about material causation. To this end we discuss Descartes’ journey to his mature position by emphasizing the growing epistemic limitations of his philosophy, which culminate in what we call his epistemic stance. (shrink)

One of the earliest and most influential treatises on the subject of this volume is Aristotle's Categories. Aristotle's title is a form of the Greek verb for speaking against or submitting an accusation in a legal proceeding. By the time of Aristotle, it also meant: to signify or to predicate. Surprisingly, the "predicates" Aristotle talks about include not only bits of language, but also such nonlinguistic items as the color white in a body and the knowledge of grammar in a (...) man's soul. (Categories I/ii) Equally surprising are such details as Aristotle's use of the terms 'homonymy' and 'synonymy' in connection with things talked about rather than words used to talk about them. Judging from the evidence in the Organon, the Metaphysics, and elsewhere, Aristotle was both aware of and able to mark the distinction between using and men tioning words; and so we must conclude that in the Categories, he was not greatly concerned with it. For our purposes, however, it is best to treat the term 'predication' as if it were ambiguous and introduce some jargon to disambiguate it. Code, Modrak, and other authors of the essays which follow use the terms 'linguistic predication' and 'metaphysical predication' for this. (shrink)

This paper offers a detailed account of arguments in De Caelo I by which Aristotle tried to demonstrate the necessity of the perpetual existence and the perpetual rotation of the cosmos. On our interpretation, Aristotle’s arguments are naturalistic. Instead of being based (as many have thought) on rules of logic and language, they depend, we argue, on natural science theories about abilities (δυνάμεις), e.g., to move and to change, which things have by nature and about the conditions under which these (...) abilities can be exercised. Our interpretation locates the De Caelo arguments in the context of some central doctrines of the Organon, the Metaphysics, the Physics, and other texts. The De Caelo arguments fit a number of views developed in these texts. Aristotle’s treatments of local motion, of natural motion and change, of necessity and possibility, and of abilities and their exercises are examples. But, as we interpret them, the De Caelo arguments raise serious questions about the role of (and the need for) Metaphysics A’s soulful Unmoved Mover in Aristotle’s overall natural-scientific picture. (shrink)

This paper offers a detailed account of arguments in De Caelo I by which Aristotle tried to demonstrate the necessity of the perpetual existence and the perpetual rotation of the cosmos. On our interpretation, Aristotle’s arguments are naturalistic. Instead of being based (as many have thought) on rules of logic and language, they depend, we argue, on natural science theories about abilities (δυνάμεις), e.g., to move and to change, which things have by nature and about the conditions under which these (...) abilities can be exercised. Our interpretation locates the De Caelo arguments in the context of some central doctrines of the Organon, the Metaphysics, the Physics, and other texts. The De Caelo arguments fit a number of views developed in these texts. Aristotle’s treatments of local motion, of natural motion and change, of necessity and possibility, and of abilities and their exercises are examples. But, as we interpret them, the De Caelo arguments raise serious questions about the role of (and the need for) Metaphysics A’s soulful Unmoved Mover in Aristotle’s overall natural-scientific picture. (shrink)

This paper offers a detailed account of arguments in De Caelo I by which Aristotle tried to demonstrate the necessity of the perpetual existence and the perpetual rotation of the cosmos. On our interpretation, Aristotle’s arguments are naturalistic. Instead of being based (as many have thought) on rules of logic and language, they depend, we argue, on natural science theories about abilities (δυνάμεις), e.g., to move and to change, which things have by nature and about the conditions under which these (...) abilities can be exercised. Our interpretation locates the De Caelo arguments in the context of some central doctrines of the Organon, the Metaphysics, the Physics, and other texts. The De Caelo arguments fit a number of views developed in these texts. Aristotle’s treatments of local motion, of natural motion and change, of necessity and possibility, and of abilities and their exercises are examples. But, as we interpret them, the De Caelo arguments raise serious questions about the role of (and the need for) Metaphysics A’s soulful Unmoved Mover in Aristotle’s overall natural-scientific picture. (shrink)

These are the abstracts of papers for the conference, History Unveiled Science Unfettered: A Conference in Celebration of James E. McGuire University of Pittsburgh, January 19, 2002.

This paper problematizes contemporary cultural understandings of autism. We make use of the developmental psychology concepts of ‘Theory of Mind’ and ‘mindblindness’ to uncover the meaning of autism as expressed in these concepts. Our concern is that autism is depicted as a puzzle and that this depiction governs not only the way Western culture treats autism but also the way in which it governs everyday interactions with autistic people. Moreover, we show how the concepts of Theory of Mind and mindblindness (...) require autism to be a puzzle in the first place. Rather than treat autism as a puzzle that must be solved, we treat autism as a teacher and thus as having something valuable to contribute toward an understanding of the inherent partiality and uncertainty of human communication and collective life. (shrink)

The concept of self-motion is not only fundamental in Aristotle's argument for the Prime Mover and in ancient and medieval theories of nature, but it is also central to many theories of human agency and moral responsibility. In this collection of mostly new essays, scholars of classical, Hellenistic, medieval, and early modern philosophy and science explore the question of whether or not there are such things as self-movers, and if so, what their self-motion consists in. They trace the development of (...) the concept of self-motion from its formulation in Aristotle's metaphysics, cosmology, and philosophy of nature through two millennia of philosophical, religious, and scientific thought. This volume contains "Self-Movers" (David Furley), "Aristotle on Self-Motion" (Mary Louise Gill), "Aristotle on Perception, Appetition, and Self-Motion" (Cynthia Freeland), "Self-Movement and External Causation" (Susan Sauvé Meyer), "Aristotle on the Mind's Self-Motion" (Michael Wedin), "Mind and Motion in Aristotle" (Christopher Shields), "Aristotle's Prime Mover" (Aryeh Kosman), "The Transcendence of the Prime Mover" (Lindsay Judson), "Self-Motion in Stoic Philosophy" (David Hahm), "Duns Scotus on the Reality of Self-Change" (Peter King), "Ockham, Self-Motion, and the Will" (Calvin Normore), and "Natural Motion and Its Causes: Newton on the 'Vis Insita' of Bodies" (J. E. McGuire). Originally published in 1994. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905. (shrink)

If dominating functions in ω ω are adjoined repeatedly over a model of GCH via a finite-support c.c.c. iteration, then in the resulting generic extension there are no long towers, every well-ordered unbounded family of increasing functions is a scale, and the splitting number s (and hence the distributivity number h) remains at ω 1.

We study the I-ultrafilters on ω, where I is a collection of subsets of a set X, usually R or ω 1 . The I-ultrafilters usually contain the P-points, often as a small proper subset. We study relations between I-ultrafilters for various I, and closure of I-ultrafilters under ultrafilter sums. We consider, but do not settle, the question whether I-ultrafilters always exist.

We study the $I$-ultrafilters on $\omega$, where $I$ is a collection of subsets of a set $X$, usually $\mathbb{R}$ or $\omega_1$. The $I$-ultrafilters usually contain the $P$-points, often as a small proper subset. We study relations between $I$-ultrafilters for various $I$, and closure of $I$-ultrafilters under ultrafilter sums. We consider, but do not settle, the question whether $I$-ultrafilters always exist.

There is a thematic unity to these essays on Newton's thought: they are concerned with the central categories of Newton's metaphysics of nature (matter, causation, force, space, time) and the ways in which Newton's work relates to cultural themes such as providence and creation. Focusing on questions of tradition and innovation and Newton's engaged response to the broader patterns of his contemporary culture, they present a unified, interpretive stance that often challenges the scholarly orthodoxies. The essays contain a large body (...) of unpublished manuscript material that is related exegetically to the corpus of Newton's published writings. Accordingly, they provide a fresh basis for understanding and clarifying the inner dynamics of Newton's thought. Audience: Historians, philosophers and sociologists of early modern thought, and those who have an interest in the intellectual achievements of Isaac Newton. (shrink)

Several canonical partition theorems are obtained, including a simultaneous generalization of Neumer's lemma and the Erdos-Rado theorem. The canonical partition relation for infinite cardinals is completely determined, answering a question of Erdos and Rado. Counterexamples are given showing that in several ways these results cannot be improved.

Let κ denote a regular uncountable cardinal and NS the normal ideal of nonstationary subsets of κ. Our results concern the well-known open question whether NS fails to be κ + -saturated, i.e., are there κ + stationary subsets of κ with pairwise intersections nonstationary? Our first observation is: Theorem. NS is κ + -saturated iff for every normal ideal J on κ there is a stationary set $A \subseteq \kappa$ such that $J = NS \mid A = \{X \subseteq (...) \kappa:X \cap A \in NS\}$ . Turning our attention to large cardinals, we extend the usual (weak) Mahlo hierarchy to define "greatly Mahlo" cardinals and obtain the following: Theorem. If κ is greatly Mahlo then NS is not κ + -saturated. Theorem. If κ is ordinal Π 1 1 -indescribable (e.g., weakly compact), ethereal (e.g., subtle), or carries a κ-saturated ideal, then κ is greatly Mahlo. Moreover, there is a stationary set of greatly Mahlo cardinals below any ordinal Π 1 1 -indescribable cardinal. These methods apply to other normal ideals as well; e.g., the subtle ideal on an ineffable cardinal κ is not κ + -saturated. (shrink)

One of the contemporary results of Germany’s memorial conundrum is the rise of its “counter-monuments”: brazen, painfully self-conscious memorial spaces conceived to challenge the very premises of their being. On the former site of Hamburg’s greatest synagogue, at Bornplatz, Margrit Kahl has assembled an intricate mosaic tracing the complex lines of the synagogue’s roof construction: a palimpsest for a building and community that no longer exist. Norbert Radermacher bathes a guilty landscape in Berlin’s Neukölln neighborhood with the inscribed light of (...) its past. Alfred Hrdlicka began a monument in Hamburg to counter—and thereby neutralize—an indestructible Nazi monument nearby. In a suburb of Hamburg, Jochen Gerz and Esther Shalev-Gerz have erected a black pillar against fascism and for peace designed to disappear altogether over time. The very heart of Berlin, former site of the gestapo headquarters, remains a great, gaping wound as politicians, artists, and various committees forever debate the most appropriate memorial for this site.4 4. The long-burning debate surrounding projected memorials, to the Gestapo-Gelände in particular, continues to exemplify both the German memorial conundrum and the state’s painstaking attempts to articulate it. For an excellent documentation of the process, see Topographie des Terrors: Gestapo, SS und Reichssicherheitshauptamt auf dem “Prinz-Albrecht-Gelände,” ed. Reinhard Rürup . For a shorter account, see James E. Young, “The Topography of German Memory,” The Journal of Art 1 : 30. James E. Young is assistant professor of English and Judaic studies at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He is the author of Writing and Rewriting the Holocaust: Narrative and the Consequences of Interpretation and The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning in Europe, Israel, and America , from which this essay is drawn. He is also the curator of “The Art of Memory,” an exhibition at the Jewish Museum of New York. (shrink)

We study various aspects of the size, including the cardinality, of closed unbounded subsets of [λ]<κ, especially when λ = κ+n for n ε ω. The problem is resolved into the study of the size of certain stationary sets. Relative to the existence of an ω1-Erdös cardinal it is shown consistent that ωω3 < ωω13 and every closed unbounded subsetof [ω3]<ω2 has cardinality ωω13. A weakening of the ω1-Erdös property, ω1-remarkability, is defined and shown to be retained under a large (...) class of Easton-like forcings applied to ω1-Erdös cardinals. A class of reverse-Easton forcings preserving α-Erdösness is also described, with special attention to the establishment of □-principles. Article Outline. (shrink)

This essay uses a mental files theory of singular thought—a theory saying that singular thought about and reference to a particular object requires possession of a mental store of information taken to be about that object—to explain how we could have such thoughts about abstract mathematical objects. After showing why we should want an explanation of this I argue that none of three main contemporary mental files theories of singular thought—acquaintance theory, semantic instrumentalism, and semantic cognitivism—can give it. I argue (...) for two claims intended to advance our understanding of singular thought about mathematical abstracta. First, that the conditions for possession of a file for an abstract mathematical object are the same as the conditions for possessing a file for an object perceived in the past—namely, that the agent retains information about the object. Thus insofar as we are able to have memory-based files for objects perceived in the past, we ought to be able to have files for abstract mathematical objects too. Second, at least one recently articulated condition on a file’s being a device for singular thought—that it be capable of surviving a certain kind of change in the information it contains—can be satisfied by files for abstract mathematical objects. (shrink)