Dans cet article sont commentées trois tentatives de résolution de la Belle au bois dormant, la célèbre énigme d'auto-localisation qui engendre un paradoxe probabiliste troublant : l'arbitrage fréquentiste propose une lecture ontologique des probabilités lorsque l'approche bayésienne atteint une limite ; l'analogie avec le Monty Hall s'efforce de penser de nouvelles règles de révision doxastique communes aux deux problèmes ; enfin, la leçon des compagnons encourage le partage et l'harmonisation d'estimations probabilistes entre agents rationnels. Chacun des trois arguments est rappelé (...) brièvement, puis certaines parties sont examinées plus attentivement, critiquées ou au contraire appuyées par des idées neuves, telles que la variante des Quatre Belles. (shrink)

This book is about love. What it is and what it isn't. It is about you--and about everybody who has ever reached out to touch the heart of another. Among many other lessons of the heart, Leo Buscaglia reminds us: Love is open arms. If you close your arms about love you will find that you are left holding only yourself. From the Paperback edition.

The far reaching changes in man's social and personal life taking place in our lifetime underline the need for a sound ethical evaluation of our rights and duties and of human behaviour both on the individual level and in the political society. On many issues judgments of value vary widely and a consultation of the thought of Thomas Aquinas on the basic questions will be helpful, the more since he is not only one of the greatest philosophers but also succeeded (...) in integrating in his moral philosophy the wisdom of the ancients, in particular of Aristotle and the Stoa. This book presents Aquinas's thought on such central questions as man's happiness, how to determine the morality of our actions, the natural law and the main virtues, as well as on the common good, war, human labour, love and friendship. Throughout the book the intellectual character of this moral philosophy is pointed out and problems are set in a historical perspective. (shrink)

Reading Aristotle with Thomas Aquinas: His Commentaries on Aristotle's Major Works offers an original and decisive work for the understanding of the thought of Thomas Aquinas. For decades his commentaries on the major works of Aristotle have been the subject of lively discussions. Are his commentaries faithful and reliable expositions of the Stagirite's thought or do they contain Thomas's own philosophy and are they read through the lens of Thomas's own Christian faith and in doing so possibly distorting Aristotle? In (...) order to be able to provide clarity and offer a nuanced response to this question, a careful study of all the relevant texts is needed. This is precisely what the author sets out do to in this work. Each chapter is devoted to one of the twelve commentaries Thomas wrote on major works of Aristotle including both his massive and influential commentaries on the Metaphysics, Physics and Nicomachean Ethics as well as lesser known commentaries. Elders places Thomas's commentary in its historical context, reviews the Greek, Arabic and Latin translation and reception of Aristotle's text as well as contemporary interpretations thereof and presents the reader with a thorough presentation and analysis of the content of the commentary, drawing attention to all the places where Thomas intervenes and makes special observations. In this way the reader can study Aristotle's treatises with Thomas as guide. The conclusion reached is that Thomas's commentaries are a masterful and faithful presentation of Aristotle's thought and of that of Thomas himself. Thomas's Christian faith does not falsify Aristotle's text, but gives occasionally an outlook at what lies behind philosophical thought. (shrink)

Charles W. Curtis is a prominent mathematician who has made important contributions to the field of representation theory. His textbooks in this field have been classics for a long time. In Pioneers of Representation Theory he has set out to present the historical development of the main ideas of the discipline, from the work of Georg Ferdinand Frobenius in the 1890s up to 1960. In addition to Frobenius, the book focuses mainly on three other “pioneers”: William Burnside, Issai Schur, and (...) Richard Brauer.Curtis states that his interest in the history of representation theory arose gradually, and jointly with that of Reiner, in the process of writing their textbooks. Thus, a main aim of the book is to show how the pioneers reached their important results while using only the mathematics then available to them. In order to do so, Curtis presents successive and thorough accounts of the works in which the new and seminal ideas of the pioneers were introduced and then developed. At the same time, however, he simplifies some of the original arguments by translating them into modern terminology.In an attempt to make the book appealing and accessible to a wider circle of potential readers, some of the necessary mathematics is explained. Thus Chapter 1 presents an introduction to the basic ideas and problems of nineteenth‐century algebra and number theory; later on, as the need arises, additional mathematical sections addressed to nonexperts are included. Of course, even this very clear presentation will be accessible only to readers with at least a graduate‐level knowledge of algebra.Curtis also attempts to provide some historical context. He is particularly concerned to clarify the main problems that the work of each of the mathematicians discussed here was originally meant to resolve. In a book of this kind this is surely one of the major benefits that the reader may expect to obtain.There are biographical sketches of the major figures involved, as well as additional information about other participants. Some illuminating documents are quoted, and Curtis supplies brief accounts of the mathematical traditions within which each of the pioneers was educated and worked. He acknowledges, however, that Pioneers of Representation Theory has only a limited claim as a work of historical research. He thus provides references to more historically oriented work that interested readers can consult. In particular, he mentions several articles by Thomas Hawkins; it should be stressed that much of Hawkins's work has recently been published in book form: Emergence of the Theory of Lie Groups: An Essay in the History of Mathematics, 1869–1926 . Curtis's and Hawkins's books complement each other in many important ways, and each should appeal to readers of the other.Charles Curtis has written an impressive, authoritative, and well‐informed book on a difficult subject. Mathematicians and historians of twentieth‐century mathematics with the relevant background will find it difficult but rewarding reading. Along the way, historiographical questions may arise. To what extent is it possible to translate, as Curtis does, the original proofs of the pioneers into more modern terminology and yet remain faithful to the sources? In most cases, however, it will require the technical expertise of the author himself to answer questions like this one properly. We can only hope that the firm starting point this book provides will lead Curtis to further historical research in this and related fields. (shrink)

Many theists conceive of God as a perfect being, i.e., as that than which none greater is metaphysically possible. On this grand view of God, it seems plausible to think that such a supreme and maximally great being would not be subject to luck of any sort. Given the divine perfections, God is completely insulated from luck. However, I argue that the opposite is true: precisely because God is perfect, he is subject to a kind of luck called constitutive luck. (...) In this paper, first I provide an analysis of luck and then explain the concept of constitutive luck. I proceed to defend constitutive luck from charges of incoherence and examine a different approach to make sense of this luck. Furthermore, I distinguish between two kinds of constitutive luck and argue that even if God isn’t subject to one kind, evading the second kind is unsuccessful. I offer two ways that God is constitutively lucky and reach a surprising conclusion: a perfect being is the luckiest of all possible beings. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:A Christian Commentary on the DhammapadaLeo D. LefebureWhen the great composer Charles Ives was growing up in Danbury, Connecticut, in the late nineteenth century, he heard his father’s marching band on one side of the town square, as well as another marching band playing separately on the other side, but close enough to be within earshot of his father’s band. The sounds of the two bands clashed with each (...) other within the hearing of young Charles, violating all the usual rules of musical composition but creating a new, intriguing experience as he held them both in his hearing at the same time. Years later the memory of such experiences flowed into the mature music of his Fourth Symphony and other works.Some years ago I was chatting with Paul Knitter at a reception at a Catholic Theological Society of America convention when Catherine Cornille approached us with her usual energy and enthusiasm and asked us whether we would each like to contribute to her projected series of Christian commentaries on sacred non-Christian texts. In some ways the challenge of this project resembles that of the young Charles Ives—if we are already listening to one marching band, how do we hear another marching band that comes within our hearing, flowing into our awareness at the same time? In some regards the sounds directly clash, creating unimagined dissonances; the rhythms bounce against each other, breaking the rules of regularity; but out of the flux there may emerge a new aesthetic whole greater than the sum of its parts.As I reflected on Catherine’s invitation, the text that kept coming to mind was the Dhammapada, because I had cherished and appreciated this text for many years. The thought of writing a book-length commentary on the Dhammapada excited me. Later, Peter Feldmeier offered to join me, and so the project became a joint venture, with Peter offering a new translation and explanations of the Buddhist context and myself offering a Christian response. This essay is a reflection on my contribution to the process of writing a Christian commentary on the Dhammapada; portions are taken from the introduction and epilogue of that work.1 [End Page 181]Biblical Wisdom and the DhammapadaMuch of the challenge of comparative theology is deciding which aspects of the respective traditions to compare. I had long worked on the ancient Jewish wisdom tradition and its later reverberations in Christian theology, and so this was my starting point on the Christian side. To use the imagery of Ives’s experience, this was my original marching band. Like a marching band, the biblical wisdom tradition is not static, not a set of fixed positions, but always on the move. The wisdom teachers of the Old Testament engaged in conversations with the sages of Mesopotamia and Egypt; Solomon famously entertained the Queen of Sheba and they discussed wisdom together. The book of Proverbs includes an adaptation of the Egyptian Wisdom of Amenemope. Later, when the Greek philosophical tradition marched within range of hearing, heirs of the Jewish wisdom tradition such as Philo of Alexandria incorporated Hellenistic philosophies as well. We can also see this in the Wisdom of Solomon. Hellenistic Jewish wisdom writings were the matrix from which much of early Christian theology emerged. So my original marching band was already a blend of other bands.In form, the Dhammapada is a collection of wisdom sayings similar to the biblical book of Proverbs. There is no narrative. There are themes that recur again and again, and each chapter has a traditional title. Shakyamuni Buddha did not claim to be a prophet. He did not base his teaching on any special revelation from God, but rather on his own insight into the causes of suffering and the path to the end of suffering. Some sayings specifically address monastic life; others address all human beings.For Christians to ponder the wisdom of the Dhammapada is to enter into an age-old conversation concerning wisdom that spans centuries and continents and includes many different dimensions. I approach the Dhammapada as a wisdom text, aligning this discussion with the tradition of interreligious and intercultural sapiential dialogue that reaches... (shrink)

Horst Seidl of the University of Nijmegen has written an unusual book. It consists of a series of critical reviews of publications by other scholars concerning Aristotle's logic, epistemology and metaphysics. The author's approach is not merely historical and critical: a philosopher must reach definite, objective truth. He reminds the reader that this is a difficult enterprise: too often Aristotle's works have been interpreted from the viewpoint of particular theories. Seidl's study is a defense of Aristotle's doctrines and methods such (...) as the use of syllogisms, the theory of the possible, etc. Somewhat surprisingly Seidl asserts that deductive arguments cannot be used in metaphysics. (shrink)

In this voluminous and detailed study of the views of leading philosophers from Descartes to Schelling on the problem of God, Clayton argues that when one studies the history of philosophical theology in the modern period and the different attempts at a solution, it is possible to find a basis for a well-founded choice. Clayton begins his investigation with the authors of this period, borrows their starting points and critical positions, such as Kant’s view that the idea of God cannot (...) be derived from finite experiences, and disengages himself from a way of thinking which considers it possible to reach certitude about the existence of God. (shrink)

This is an interesting and useful book with essays by Lewis White Beck, Ernst Cassierer, Hermann Cohen, Richard Hönigswald, Hansgeorg Hoppe, Edmund Husserl, Ram Adhar Mall, Jeffrie G. Murphy, Alois Riehl, Wolfgang Stegmüller, Martha E. Williams. All thirteen essays or notes reprinted concern the relationship between Hume and Kant. Its publication follows the 200th anniversary of the appearance of the Kritik der reinen Vernunft. Common to both philosophers is the view that scientific knowledge depends on the knowledge of man. In (...) a long introduction the editor briefly recalls Hume's place in the history of philosophy. Turning to Kant he points out that Kant realized that if we take Hume's view of causality seriously, it cannot but lead to scepticism. Thus he felt obliged to look for a foundation of the sciences in the trans-subjective structure of the human mind. However, Kant never became an empiricist, but still subscribed to what Russell called a "pre-Humean rationalism." Nevertheless there is a convergence between both philosophers: Hume feels that one cannot go beyond the presence of percepts in one's own consciousness. Now Kant is equally convinced that our theoretical knowledge is limited to appearances. What lies beyond the appearances--das Ding an sich--cannot be reached. (shrink)

ResumenLeo Strauss, en un ambiente filosófico adverso, tuvo la osadía de interrogarse acerca de la mejor forma de vida. Sin embargo, no parece haber alcanzado acabadamente su meta. El carácter zetético de su gnoseología, el abandono de conceptos metafísicos indispensables para alcanzar la unidad de ser, su énfasis en la «negatividad» del método socrático que limita la «positividad» propia de la mayéutica: el amor a la verdad, etc. le han conducido a la aporía consistente en la imposibilidad de alcanzar una (...) síntesis entre razón y revelación, consideradas como «totalidades» incompatibles entre sí. Por ello, no llega a dar respuesta a su interrogante más profundo.Palabras claveLeo Strauss, razón-revelación, escepticismo moderado, mayéutica.AbstractIn philosophical adverse times, Leo Strauss dared question about the best way of life. However, he does not seem to have achieved his objective completely. His zetetic epistemology; the abandonment of key metaphysical concepts necessary to comprehend the unity of being; his stress on the negativity stage of the Socratic method, limiting the conclusive positive stage of the maieutic (love of wisdom) have led him to an aporia. This is the impossibility of reaching a synthesis between reason and revelation, considered as «wholes» incompatible with each other. Hence he doesn’t find a convincing answer to his deepest inquiry about the best way of life.KeywordsLeo Strauss, reason-revelation, moderate scepticism, mai. (shrink)

Philosophers often claim that forgiveness is a paradoxical phenomenon. I here examine two of the most widespread ways of dealing with the paradoxical nature of forgiveness. One of these ways, emblematized by Aurel Kolnai, seeks to resolve the paradox by appealing to the idea of repentance. Somehow, if a wrongdoer repents, then forgiving her is no longer paradoxical. I argue that this influential position faces more problems than it solves. The other way to approach the paradox, exemplified here by the (...) work of Jacques Derrida, is just too obscure to be by itself helpful. Yet, I argue that what I take to be its spirit is on the right track. I recommend distinguishing between the definition and the justification of forgiveness, and also between forgiveness understood as a mental phenomenon and an overt, communicative act. These distinctions are not given their due in the specialized literature, and I expose the nefarious consequences of this neglect. By focusing on forgiveness as a mental phenomenon I seek to analyze the root of the talk of paradoxes which surrounds the discussion of forgiveness. Finally, I present an analysis of forgiveness as a pure mental phenomenon, and argue that this analysis is the most important step in understanding forgiveness in any other sense. While my analysis reveals interesting aspects of forgiveness, it reveals, too, that forgiveness is not quite as paradoxical after all. (shrink)

Not long ago, the actor and playwright Tim Robbins directed a production in New York and Los Angeles called Embedded. The play is strange, but nowhere more so than in one, infamous scene: a black mass in honor of the deceased political philosopher Leo Strauss, conducted by candlelight by advisers to President Bush in the run-up to the Iraq war. Characters who are transparent representations of Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz and Condoleezza Rice masturbate with abandon, all (...) the while yelping “hail Leo Strauss!” beneath an outsized portrait of his face. The scene reaches a climax with this verbal ejaculation from “Woof” : “I'm hard! I'm rock hard!”. (shrink)

The present volume contains articles of well-known representatives of the Meaning-Text Theory (MTT) and other related linguistic theories. Founded by I. Mel'cuk and A. Zholkovsky in the sixties in Moscow, MTT soon became known in the West as a “prominent outsider” theory. The picture changed since then, though. MTT gained importance in several areas of linguistics and computational linguistics. It influenced the design of new grammar formalisms such as Dependency Tree Grammars. Also, specific parts of MTT have been directly overtaken (...) into other theories; consider, for example, the work on integrating Lexical Functions into Pustejovsky's Generative Lexicon. The present volume is a further convincing demonstration of MTT's liveliness and relevance to the field's “burning” issues. The focus of the volume is on semantics, semantic representation and relation of semantics to surface in MTT. Six out of eight articles (Polguère; Escalier & Fournier; Paducheva; St.-Germain; Beck; Bogulavsky) deal with problems related to these topics, while the last two articles of the volume (Sgall and Rambow; Joshi) throw a bridge between MTT, or, more precisely, between dependency-based theories of which MTT is one instantiation, and other linguistic theories. (shrink)

"-- M. J. Silverthorne,The Humanities Association Review Leo Strauss (1899-1973) was the Robert Maynard Hutchins Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus of ...

This chapter focuses on physicist Leo Szilard. Born in Budapest but living and working in Berlin from 1920 to 1933, Szilard was quick to recognize the dangers posed by the Nazis. By July 1932, he began to think of leaving Europe and, early in the new year, he warned his friend, the mathematician Michael Polanyi, ‘Things will get worse under Hitler. Much worse’, and advised his family in Budapest, ‘Leave Europe before it is too late’. He himself left Germany for (...) Vienna on the 30 March. The chapter argues that while in Vienna in April 1933, it was Szilard who lent urgency to Beveridge's discussions, and helped elevate a scholarship scheme for displaced academics into the much wider project of creating an international network to resettle Jewish and left-wing academics beyond the reach of the Nazis. (shrink)

This collection of Leo Abse's last essays are writings that he was working on from 2006 up to and during his final illness.

The essays are based on a long and intimate familiarity with the works, but the essay on Aristotle is especially important as one of Strauss's few writings on ...

Offering an innovative approach to critical thinking, Good Reasoning Matters! identifies the essential structure of good arguments in a variety of contexts and also provides guidelines to help students construct their own effective arguments. In addition to examining the most common features of faulty reasoning--slanting, bias, propaganda, vagueness, ambiguity, and a common failure to consider opposing points of view--the book introduces a variety of argument schemes and rhetorical techniques. This edition adds material on visual arguments and more exercises.

This uniquely fascinating volume is not merely a learned treatise in historical semantics; it is itself a stupendous display of world harmony as a creed-a vivid demonstration that "all is all.".

Politics, Philosophy & Economics, Volume 21, Issue 4, Page 347-371, November 2022. We sometimes have to choose between options that are seemingly incomparable insofar as they seem to be neither better than, worse than, nor equal to each other. This often happens when the available options are quite different from one another. For instance, consider a choice between prioritizing either criminal justice reform or healthcare reform as a public policy goal. Even after the relevant details of the goals and possible (...) reforms are filled in, it is plausible that neither goal is better than, worse than, nor equal to the other. Such seemingly incomparable options present a problem for rational choice since it is unclear how an agent might rationally choose between them. What we need are some principles to help govern rational choice when faced with seemingly incomparable options. I here present three such principles. While each principle is individually compelling, I show that they are jointly incompatible. I then argue that the correct response to this inconsistent triad is to reject the principle that rationally censures performing a sequence of choices one knows will result in a suboptimal outcome. The upshot is that when seeming incomparability is involved, an agent can money pump themselves without being less rational for it. (shrink)

For much of the first fifty years of its existence, analytic philosophy shunned discussions of normativity and ethics. Ethical statements were considered as pseudo-propositions, or as expressions of pro- or con-attitudes of minor theoretical significance. Nowadays, in contrast, prominent analytic philosophers pay close attention to normative problems. Here we focus our attention on the work of Searle, at the same time drawing out an important connection between Searle’s work and that of two other seminal figures in this development: H.L.A. Hart (...) and John Rawls. We show that all three thinkers tend to assume that there is but one type of normativity within the realm of social institutions – roughly, the sort of normativity that is involved in following the results of chess – and that they thereby neglect features that are of crucial significance for an adequate understanding of social reality. (shrink)

The age-old debate about what constitutes just punishment has become deadlocked. Retributivists continue to privilege desert over all else, and consequentialists continue to privilege punishment's expected positive consequences, such as deterrence or rehabilitation, over all else. In this important intervention into the debate, Leo Zaibert argues that despite some obvious differences, these traditional positions are structurally very similar, and that the deadlock between them stems from the fact they both oversimplify the problem of punishment. Proponents of these positions pay insufficient (...) attention to the conflicts of values that punishment, even when justified, generates. Mobilizing recent developments in moral philosophy, Zaibert offers a properly pluralistic justification of punishment that is necessarily more complex than its traditional counterparts. An understanding of this complexity should promote a more cautious approach to inflicting punishment on individual wrongdoers and to developing punitive policies and institutions. (shrink)

With a view to the theme of church renewal, this article explores the role of a well-known and popular phrase in the Reformed tradition within Protestantism, that is, ecclesia reformata semper reformanda [‘the reformed church should always be reformed’]. Is this a helpful slogan when considering the possibilities and the limitations of church renewal? Firstly, the historical background of this phrase is described: it is rooted in the Dutch Reformed tradition, and only in the 20th century it was widely recognised (...) in Reformed circles. Against this background the hermeneutical problem, linked with the principle of sola Scriptura, is presented, and put into an ecumenical ecclesiological perspective: the church is grounded in the gospel. Finally, the article focuses on church polity as an important field of renewal, taking into account Karl Barth’s interpretation of this phrase. From this perspective, a balanced and ecumenical approach of church renewal is possible. (shrink)

' Here is Tolstoy's religion; and non-violence is at its heart. Simon Parke, author of The Beautiful Life.

During the last decade, one source of debate in argumentation theory has been the notion that there are different modes of arguing that need to be distinguished when analyzing and evaluating arguments. Visual argument is often cited as a paradigm example. This paper discusses the ways in which it and modes of arguing that invoke non-verbal sounds, smells, tactile sensations, music and other non-verbal entities may be defined and conceptualized. Though some attempts to construct a ‘multimodal’ theory of argument are (...) criticized, it advocates for an argumentation theory that makes room for visual arguing and for other non-verbal modes that have not been explored in depth. In the process, the paper provides a method for identifying the structure of multimodal arguments and argues that adding modes to our theoretical tool box is an important step toward a comprehensive account of argument. (shrink)

In Homos, he studies the historical, political, and philosophical grounds for the current distrust, within the gay community, of self-identifying moves, for the ...

Most infonnallogic texts and articles assume a verbal account of reasoning which defines "argument" as a set of sentences. The present paper broadens this definition in order to account for "visual arguments" which are communicated with nonverbal visual images. Standard approaches to verbal arguments are extended in a way that allows them to explain and evaluate visual argumentation.

Contextualizing the emergence of history of philosophy within eighteenth-century German Enlightenment, this book discusses the philosophical nature of the historiographical concept ‘system of philosophy’ and the concept’s influence upon the methods of history of philosophy and history of ideas.

Informal logic is an attempt to develop a logic that can assess and analyze the arguments that occur in natural language discourse. Discussions in the field may address instances of scientific, legal, and other technical forms of reasoning, but the overriding aim has been a comprehensive account of argument that can explain and evaluate the arguments found in discussion, debate and disagreement as they manifest themselves in daily life — in social and political commentary; in news reports and editorials in (...) the mass media ; in advertising and corporate and governmental communications; and in personal exchange. (shrink)

In the paper ‘COVID-19 vaccine boosters for young adults: a risk–benefit assessment and ethical analysis of mandate policies at universities,’ Bardoshet alargued that college mandates of the COVID-19 booster vaccine are unethical. The authors came to this conclusion by performing three different sets of comparisons of benefits versus risks using referenced data and argued that the harm outweighs the risk in all three cases. In this response article, we argue that the authors frame their arguments by comparing values that are (...) not scientifically or reasonably comparable and that the authors used values that represent grossly different risk profiles and grouped them into a set of figures to create an illusion of fair comparisons. We argue that absent the falsely skewed portrayals of a higher level of risk over benefit in their misrepresented figures, the five ethical arguments they presented completely fall apart. (shrink)

Metaphysics, formerly the queen of science, fell into oblivion under the onslaught of empiricism and positivism and its very possibllity came to be denied. Professor Elders traces the history of this process and shows how St. Thomas innovated in determining both the subject of metaphysics and the manner in which one enters this science, particularly in the framework of his Aristotle commentaries. The work then considers being and its properties, its divisions into being in act and being in potency, into (...) the act of being essence, and into substance and the accidents. Finally the causes of being are considered. The work also introduces and surveys the extensive literature of Thomas interpretation of the past 50 years. (shrink)

Language has a rich typology of inferential types. It was recently shown that subjects are able to divide the informational content of new visual stimuli among the various slots of the inferential typology: when gestures or visual animations are used in lieu of specific words in a sentence, they can trigger the very same inferential types as language alone (Tieu et al., 2019 ). How general are the relevant triggering algorithms? We show that they extend to the auditory modality and (...) to music cognition. We tested whether pro-speech musical gestures, i.e. musical excerpts that replace words in sentences, can give rise to the same inferences. We show that it is possible to replicate the same typology of inferences using pro-speech music. Minimal and complex musical excerpts can behave just like language, gestures, and visual animations with respect to the logical behavior of their content when embedded in sentences. Specifically, we found that pro-speech music can generate scalar implicatures, presuppositions, supplements, and homogeneity inferences. (shrink)

Leo Corry tells the story behind the idea of number, from the early days of the Pythagoreans, up until the turn of the twentieth century. He presents an overview of how numbers were handled and conceived in classical Greek mathematics, in the mathematics of Islam, in European mathematics of the middle ages and the Renaissance, during the scientific revolution, all the way through to the mathematics of the 18th to the early 20th century.

The present paper elaborates a deductivist account of natural language argu-ment in the context of pragma-dialectics. It reviews earlier debates, criticizes some standard misconceptions in the literature, and argues that the identification and analysis of deductive argument schemes can be the basis of a compelling theory of argumentative discourse.

Punishment is a phenomenon which occurs in many contexts. Discussions of punishment assume punishment is criminal punishment carried out by the State. This book contains an account of punishment which overcomes the difficulties of competing accounts and treats punishment comprehensibly to better understand how it differs from similar phenomena, discussing its justification fruitfully.

The ArgumentRecent studies in the philosophy of mathematics have increasingly stressed the social and historical dimensions of mathematical practice. Although this new emphasis has fathered interesting new perspectives, it has also blurred the distinction between mathematics and other scientific fields. This distinction can be clarified by examining the special interaction of thebodyandimagesof mathematics.Mathematics has an objective, ever-expanding hard core, the growth of which is conditioned by socially and historically determined images of mathematics. Mathematics also has reflexive capacities unlike those of (...) any other exact science. In no other exact science can the standard methodological framework usedwithinthe discipline also be used to study the nature of the discipline itself.Although it has always been present in mathematical research, reflexive thinking has become increasingly central to mathematics over the past century. Many of the images of the discipline have been dictated by the increase in reflexive thinking which has also determined a great portion of the contemporary philosophy and historiography of mathematics. (shrink)