50 found
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  1. (1 other version)Quantum holism: nonseparability as common ground.Jenann Ismael & Jonathan Schaffer - 2020 - Synthese 197 (10):4131-4160.
    Quantum mechanics seems to portray nature as nonseparable, in the sense that it allows spatiotemporally separated entities to have states that cannot be fully specified without reference to each other. This is often said to implicate some form of “holism.” We aim to clarify what this means, and why this seems plausible. Our core idea is that the best explanation for nonseparability is a “common ground” explanation, which casts nonseparable entities in a holistic light, as scattered reflections of a more (...)
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  2. How Physics Makes Us Free.Jenann Ismael - 2016 - , US: Oxford University Press USA.
    In 1687 Isaac Newton ushered in a new scientific era in which laws of nature could be used to predict the movements of matter with almost perfect precision. Newton's physics also posed a profound challenge to our self-understanding, however, for the very same laws that keep airplanes in the air and rivers flowing downhill tell us that it is in principle possible to predict what each of us will do every second of our entire lives, given the early conditions of (...)
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  3. The situated self.Jenann Ismael - 2007 - New York: Oxford University Press.
    J. T. Ismael's monograph is an ambitious contribution to metaphysics and the philosophy of language and mind. She tackles a philosophical question whose origin goes back to Descartes: What am I? The self is not a mere thing among things--but if so, what is it, and what is its relationship to the world? Ismael is an original and creative thinker who tries to understand our problematic concepts about the self and how they are related to our use of language in (...)
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  4. Raid! Dissolving the big, bad bug.Jenann Ismael - 2008 - Noûs 42 (2):292–307.
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  5. How do causes depend on us? The many faces of perspectivalism.Jenann Ismael - 2016 - Synthese 193 (1):245-267.
    Huw Price has argued that on an interventionist account of cause the distinction is perspectival, and the claim prompted some interesting responses from interventionists and in particular an exchange with Woodward that raises questions about what it means to say that one or another structure is perspectival. I’ll introduce his reasons for claiming that the distinction between cause and effect on an interventionist account is perspectival. Then I’ll introduce a distinction between different ways in which a class of concepts can (...)
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  6. Symmetry as a guide to superfluous theoretical structure.Jenann Ismael & Bas C. van~Fraassen - 2002 - In Katherine Brading & Elena Castellani (eds.), Symmetries in Physics: Philosophical Reflections. New York: Cambridge University Press. pp. 371--92.
  7. An Empiricist's Guide to Objective Modality.Jenann Ismael - 2017 - In Matthew H. Slater & Zanja Yudell (eds.), Metaphysics and the Philosophy of Science: New Essays. New York, NY, USA: Oxford University Press. pp. 109-125.
    In this paper, I defend an empiricist account of modality that keeps a substantive account of modal commitment, but throws out the metaphysics. I suggest that if we pair a deflationary attitude toward representation with a substantive account of how scientific models are constructed and put to use, the result is an account that deflates the metaphysics of modal commitment without deflating the content of modal claims.
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  8.  90
    A Modest Proposal about Chance.Jenann Ismael - 2011 - Journal of Philosophy 108 (8):416-442.
    First para: Before the 17th century, there was not much discussion, and little uniformity in conception, of natural laws. The rise of science in 17th century, Newton’s mathematization of physics, and the provision of strict, deterministic laws that applied equally to the heavens and to the terrestrial realm had a profound impact in transforming the philosophical imagination. A philosophical conception of physical law built on the example of Newtonian Mechanics became quickly entrenched. Between the 17th and 20th centuries, there was (...)
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  9.  79
    Determinism, Counterpredictive Devices, and the Impossibility of Laplacean Intelligences.Jenann Ismael - 2019 - The Monist 102 (4):478-498.
    In a famous passage drawing implications from determinism, Laplace introduced the image an intelligence who knew the positions and momenta of all of the particles of which the universe is composed, and asserted that in a deterministic universe such an intelligence would be able to predict everything that happens over its entire history. It is not, however, difficult to establish the physical possibility of a counterpredictive device, i.e., a device designed to act counter to any revealed prediction of its behavior. (...)
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  10. The Open Universe: Totality, Self-reference and Time.Jenann Ismael - forthcoming - Australasian Philosophical Review.
    Before the twentieth century, the Universe was usually imagined as a large spatially extended thing unfolding in time. The past was fixed and the future was open; unfolding was conceived as an asymmetric process of coming into being. Relativity introduced a new vision in which space and time are presented together as a single four-dimensional manifold of events. That, together with the fact that the fundamental laws of our classical theories are symmetric in time, made understanding why the past and (...)
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  11.  85
    Causation, Free Will, and Naturalism.Jenann Ismael - 2013 - In Don Ross, James Ladyman & Harold Kincaid (eds.), Scientific metaphysics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 208--235.
    This chapter addresses the worry that the existence of causal antecedents to your choices means that you are causally compelled to act as you do. It begins with the folk notion of cause, leads the reader through recent developments in the scientific understanding of causal concepts, and argues that those developments undermine the threat from causal antecedents. The discussion is then used as a model for a kind of naturalistic metaphysics that takes its lead from science, letting everyday concepts be (...)
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  12. Passage, Flow, and the Logic of Temporal Perspectives.Jenann Ismael - 2017 - In Philippe Huneman & Christophe Bouton (eds.), Time of Nature and the Nature of Time: Philosophical Perspectives of Time in Natural Sciences. Cham: Springer.
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  13.  61
    A philosopher of science looks at idealization in political theory.Jenann Ismael - 2016 - Social Philosophy and Policy 33 (1-2):11-31.
    :Rawls ignited a debate in political theory when he introduced a division between the ideal and nonideal parts of a theory of justice. In the ideal part of the theory, one presents a positive conception of justice in a setting that assumes perfect compliance with the rules of justice. In the nonideal part, one addresses the question of what happens under departures from compliance. Critics of Rawls have attacked his focus on ideal theory as a form of utopianism, and have (...)
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  14. Temporal Experience.Jenann Ismael - 2011 - In Craig Callender (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Time. Oxford University Press.
     
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  15. Quantum mechanics.Jenann Ismael - 2008 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
    Quantum mechanics is, at least at first glance and at least in part, a mathematical machine for predicting the behaviors of microscopic particles — or, at least, of the measuring instruments we use to explore those behaviors — and in that capacity, it is spectacularly successful: in terms of power and precision, head and shoulders above any theory we have ever had. Mathematically, the theory is well understood; we know what its parts are, how they are put together, and why, (...)
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  16. Science and the phenomenal.Jenann Ismael - 1999 - Philosophy of Science 66 (3):351-69.
    The Hard Problem of the mind is addressed and it is argued that physical-phenomenal property identities have the same status as the identification of an ostended bit of physical space and the coordinates assigned the spot on a map of the terrain. It is argued, that is to say, that such identities are, or follow from, stipulations which interpret the map.
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  17. Closed Causal Loops and the Bilking Argument.Jenann Ismael - 2003 - Synthese 136 (3):305-320.
    The most potentially powerful objection to the possibility oftime travel stems from the fact that it can, under the right conditions, give rise to closedcausal loops, and closed causal loops can be turned into self-defeating causal chains;folks killing their infant selves, setting out to destroy the world before they were born,and the like. It used to be thought that such chains present paradoxes; the receivedwisdom nowadays is that they give rise to physical anomalies in the form of inexplicably correlated events. (...)
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  18. Curie's principle.Jenann Ismael - 1997 - Synthese 110 (2):167-190.
    A reading is given of Curie''s Principle that the symmetry of a cause is always preserved its effects. The truth of the principle is demonstrated and its importance, under the proposed reading, is defended.As far as I see, all a priori statements in physics have their origin in symmetry. (Weyl, Symmetry, p. 126).
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  19. Which Curie’s Principle?Elena Castellani & Jenann Ismael - 2016 - Philosophy of Science 83 (5):1002-1013.
    Is there more that one "Curie's principle"? How far are different formulations legitimate? What are the aspects that make it so scientifically fruitful, independently of how it is formulated? The paper is devoted to exploring these questions. We start with illustrating Curie's original 1894 article and his focus. Then, we consider the way that the discussion of the principle took shape from early commentators to its modern form. We say why we think that the modern focus on the inter-state version (...)
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  20.  71
    What Chances Could Not Be.Jenann Ismael - 1996 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 47 (1):79-91.
    The chance of a physical event is the objective, single-case probability that it will occur. In probabilistic physical theories like quantum mechanics, the chances of physical events play the formal role that the values of physical quantities play in classical physics, and there is a temptation to regard them on the model of the latter as describing intrinsic properties of the systems to which they are assigned. I argue that this understanding of chances in quantum mechanics, despite being a part (...)
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  21. How to combine chance and determinism: Thinking about the future in an Everett universe.Jenann Ismael - 2003 - Philosophy of Science 70 (4):776-790.
    I propose, in the context of Everett interpretations of quantum mechanics, a way of understanding how there can be genuine uncertainty about the future notwithstanding that the universe is governed by known, deterministic dynamical laws, and notwithstanding that there is no ignorance about initial conditions, nor anything in the universe whose evolution is not itself governed by the known dynamical laws. The proposal allows us to draw some lessons about the relationship between chance and determinism, and to dispel one source (...)
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  22.  64
    Rememberances, Mementos, and Time-Capsules.Jenann Ismael - 2002 - Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 50:317-.
    I want to consider some features of the position put forward by Julian Barbour in The End of Time that seem to me of particular philosophical interest. At the level of generality at which I'll be concerned with it, the view is relatively easy to describe. It can be arrived at by thinking of time as decomposing in some natural way linearly ordered atomic parts, ‘moments’, and combining an observation about the internal structure of moments with an epistemological doctrine about (...)
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  23.  39
    Freedom, Compulsion, and Causation.Jenann Ismael - 2007 - PSYCHE: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Research On Consciousness 13.
    The intuitive notion of cause carries with it the idea of compulsion. When we learn that the dynamical laws are deterministic, we give this a causal reading and imagine our actions compelled to occur by conditions laid down at the beginning of the universe. Hume famously argued that this idea of compulsion is borrowed from experience and illegitimately projected onto regularities in the world. Exploiting the interventionist analysis of causal relations, together with an insight about the degeneracy of one’s epistemic (...)
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  24.  10
    How to Be Humean.Jenann Ismael - 2015 - In Barry Loewer & Jonathan Schaffer (eds.), A companion to David Lewis. Chichester, West Sussex ;: Wiley-Blackwell. pp. 188–205.
    This chapter argues that Humean analyses do not provide content‐preserving reductions and non‐trivial accounts of the reference. It introduces a distinction between structure in the realm of Being and structure in the representations of Being. The chapter argues that there are good reasons not to expect content‐preserving reductions of the modal to the non‐modal at the level of content, or useful mappings of content‐level structures into structures at the level of Being. In the rest of the chapter, the author deals (...)
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  25.  83
    On Whether the Atemporal Conception of the World Is Also Amodal.Jenann Ismael - 2015 - Analytic Philosophy 56 (2):142-157.
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  26. Saving the baby: Dennett on autobiography, agency, and the self.Jenann Ismael - 2006 - Philosophical Psychology 19 (3):345-360.
    Dennett argues that the decentralized view of human cognitive organization finding increasing support in parts of cognitive science undermines talk of an inner self. On his view, the causal underpinnings of behavior are distributed across a collection of autonomous subsystems operating without any centralized supervision. Selves are fictions contrived to simplify description and facilitate prediction of behavior with no real correlate inside the mind. Dennett often uses an analogy with termite colonies whose behavior looks organized and purposeful to the external (...)
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  27.  94
    Raid! The big, bad bug dissolved.Jenann Ismael - unknown
    There’s a long history of discussion of probability in philosophy, but objective chance separated itself off and came into its own as a topic with the advent of a physical theory - quantum mechanics - in which chances play a central, and apparently ineliminable, role. In 1980 David Lewis wrote a paper pointing out that a very broad class of accounts of the nature of chance apparently lead to a contradiction when combined with a principle that expresses the role of (...)
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  28.  5
    Immunity to error as an artefact of transition between representational media.Jenann Ismael - 2012 - .
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  29. (1 other version)So You Think You Exist? — In Defense of Nolipsism.Jenann Ismael & John L. Pollock - unknown
    Human beings think of themselves in terms of a privileged non-descriptive designator — a mental “I”. Such thoughts are called “de se” thoughts. The mind/body problem is the problem of deciding what kind of thing I am, and it can be regarded as arising from the fact that we think of ourselves non-descriptively. Why do we think of ourselves in this way? We investigate the functional role of “I” (and also “here” and “now”) in cognition, arguing that the use of (...)
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  30.  55
    Rethinking Time and Determinism: What Happens to Determinism When You Take Relativity Seriously.Jenann Ismael - 2023 - In Remy Lestienne & Paul A. Harris (eds.), Time and Science, Volume 1: The Metaphysics of Time and Its Evolution. World Scientific Publishing. pp. 147-172.
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  31.  86
    Book Symposium: David Albert, After Physics.Wayne C. Myrvold, David Z. Albert, Craig Callender & Jenann Ismael - unknown
    On April 1, 2016, at the Annual Meeting of the Pacific Division of the American Philosophical Association, a book symposium, organized by Alyssa Ney, was held in honor of David Albert’s After Physics. All participants agreed that it was a valuable and enlightening session. We have decided that it would be useful, for those who weren’t present, to make our remarks publicly available. Please bear in mind that what follows are remarks prepared for the session, and that on some points (...)
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  32. Doublemindedness: A model for a dual content cognitive architecture.Jenann Ismael - 2006 - PSYCHE: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Research On Consciousness 12.
    The outstanding stumbling blocks to any reductive account of phenomenal consciousness remain the subjectivity of phenomenal properties and cognitive and epistemic gaps that plague the relationship between physical and phenomenal properties. I suggest that a deflationary interpretation of both is available to defenders of self- representational accounts.
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  33.  64
    Essay Review: David Wallace, The Emergent Multiverse.Guido Bacciagaluppi & Jenann Ismael - unknown
    We review and discuss the recent monograph by David Wallace on Everettian Quantum Mechanics. This book is a high point of two decades of work on Everett in both physics and philosophy. It is also a beautiful and welcome exemplar of a modern way of doing metaphysics. We discuss certain aspects more critically, and take the opportunity to sketch an alternative pragmatist approach to probability in Everett, to be fully developed elsewhere.
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  34. An Objectivist Argument for Thirdism.Ian Evans, Don Fallis, Peter Gross, Terry Horgan, Jenann Ismael, John Pollock, Paul D. Thorn, Jacob N. Caton, Adam Arico, Daniel Sanderman, Orlin Vakerelov, Nathan Ballantyne, Matthew S. Bedke, Brian Fiala & Martin Fricke - 2008 - Analysis 68 (2):149-155.
    Bayesians take “definite” or “single-case” probabilities to be basic. Definite probabilities attach to closed formulas or propositions. We write them here using small caps: PROB(P) and PROB(P/Q). Most objective probability theories begin instead with “indefinite” or “general” probabilities (sometimes called “statistical probabilities”). Indefinite probabilities attach to open formulas or propositions. We write indefinite probabilities using lower case “prob” and free variables: prob(Bx/Ax). The indefinite probability of an A being a B is not about any particular A, but rather about the (...)
     
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  35. Freedom and Determinism.Jenann Ismael - forthcoming - Philosophical Explorations.
    Any person truly considering belief in a scientific world view has to confront the question of whether and in what sense, if she views herself as a natural system in a world governed by natural laws, she can continue to regard herself as free. The prima facie clash is usually expressed in terms of a conflict between freedom and determinism, captured in an argument known as the Consequence Argument. If the natural laws are deterministic, our behavior must be deducible by (...)
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  36. Causation, perspective and agency.Jenann Ismael - manuscript
    Philosophers of mind tend to take it for granted that causal relations are part of the mind-independent, objective fabric of the physical world. In fact, their status has been hotly contested since Russell famously observed that the closest thing to causal relations in physics are timesymmetric dynamical laws relating global time slices of world-history. 1 These bear a distant relationship to the local, asymmetric relations that form the core of the folk notion of cause. Nancy Cartwright, in an influential response, (...)
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  37. Death.Jenann Ismael - unknown
    Denial of death We don’t like to think about our deaths, and there are cultural developments – social, technological, economic – that make it easier than ever before to live without constant reminders of our mortality. We hide the evidence of death. We live separately from our old people, and quarantine the dying in hospitals and hospices. It’s impolite to mention death in conversation. We view death not as natural and inevitable stage of life, but as a calamity, a mistake, (...)
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  38. Being somewhere.Jenann Ismael - manuscript
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  39.  75
    Causal Reasoning in Physics.Jenann Ismael - 2016 - Philosophical Review Recent Issues 125 (3):431-435.
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  40. Essays on Symmetry.Jenann Ismael - 2001 - Routledge.
    Drawing from physics and philosophical debates, Ismael combines a set of essays on the time worn debate of symmetry from both fields.
     
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  41.  96
    Memory.Jenann Ismael - unknown
    In the general project of trying to reconcile the subjective view of the world (how things seem from the perspective of the embedded agent) with the objective view (the view of the world from the outside, as represented, for example, in our best physics), analytic philosophy, especially in recent years, has been almost solely focused on sensory phenomenology.1 There are two very salient features of the subjective view that haven’t been explored even on the descriptive side but that present prima (...)
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  42.  49
    (1 other version)Me, again.Jenann Ismael - 2010 - In Joseph Keim Campbell, Michael O'Rourke & Harry S. Silverstein (eds.), Time and Identity. Bradford.
    Thought about the self raises some very special problems. Some of these concern indexical reference quite generally, but there is one having to do with identity over time that seems to be unique to the self. I use an historical exchange between Anscombe and Descartes to bring out the problem, and propose a resolution that casts light both on why self-directed thought presents a unique epistemic predicament and where Descartes’ cogito may have gone wrong.
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  43. 10 Me, Again.Jenann Ismael - 2010 - In Joseph Keim Campbell, Michael O'Rourke & Harry S. Silverstein (eds.), Time and Identity. Bradford. pp. 209.
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  44.  85
    Probability in classical physics: The fundamental measure.Jenann Ismael - manuscript
  45. Quantum probability: Chance.Jenann Ismael - manuscript
  46. Reflexivity, Fixed Points, and Semantic Descent; How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Reflexivity.Jenann Ismael - 2011 - Acta Analytica 26 (4):295-310.
    For most of the major philosophers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, human cognition was understood as involving the mind’s reflexive grasp of its own contents. But other important figures have described the very idea of a reflexive thought as incoherent. Ryle notably likened the idea of a reflexive thought to an arm that grasps itself. Recent work in philosophy, psychology, and the cognitive sciences has greatly clarified the special epistemic and semantic properties of reflexive thought. This article is an (...)
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  47.  32
    Time: a very short introduction.Jenann Ismael - 2021 - Oxford: Oxford University Press.
    What is time? What does it mean for time to pass? Is it possible to travel in time? What is the difference between the past and future? Until the work of Newton, these questions were purely topics of philosophical speculation. Since then we've learned a great deal about time, and its study has moved from a subject of philosophical reflection to instead became part of the subject matter of physics. This Very Short Introduction introduces readers to the current physical understanding (...)
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  48. Why (Study) the Humanities?: The View from Science.Jenann Ismael - 2017 - In Stephen Robert Grimm (ed.), Making Sense of the World: New Essays on the Philosophy of Understanding. New York, NY, United States of America: Oxford University Press.
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  49.  63
    Review of The Emergent Multiverse - David Wallace, The Emergent Multiverse: Quantum Theory according to the Everett Interpretation. Oxford: Oxford University Press (2012), xvi+530 pp., $75.00. [REVIEW]Guido Bacciagaluppi & Jenann Ismael - 2015 - Philosophy of Science 82 (1):129-148.
  50.  75
    Responses to Symposiasts. [REVIEW]Jenann Ismael - 2011 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 82 (3):780-787.
    The riddle posed by the double nature of the ego certainly lies beyond [the limits of science]. On the one hand, I am a real individual man, born by a mother anddestined to carrying out real and psychical acts (far too many, I may think, if boarding a subway during an hour). On the other hand, I am "vision" open toreason, a self-penetrating light, immanent sense-giving consciousness, or how ever you may call it, and as such unique. (Weyl, Address, 3).
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