The aim of this paper is to demonstrate that adjusting Stump and Kretzmann’s “atemporal duration” with la durée, a key concept in the philosophy of Henri Bergson, can respond to the most significant objections aimed at Stump and Kretzmann’s re-interpretation of Boethian eternity. This paper deals with three of these objections: the incoherence of the notion of “atemporal duration,” the impossibility of this duration being time-like, and the problems involved in conceiving it as being related to temporal duration by a (...) relation of analogy. I conclude that “atemporal duration” — when combined with Bergson’s durée to become an “atemporal durée” — is a coherent understanding of divine eternity. (shrink)

This paper explores the influence of Henri Bergson’s (1859–1941) philosophy of time on three early twentieth-century British philosophers: Karin Costelloe-Stephen (1889–1953), Hilda Oakeley (1867–1950), and May Sinclair (1863–1946). I demonstrate that three central claims of Bergson’s account of temporal experience (novelty, memory, and indivisibility) were creatively incorporated into their accounts of time. All these philosophers place time at the centre of their philosophical systems, so this study of their views on time and temporality can deepen our understanding of their systems (...) more broadly. Further, this study helps us appreciate the reception of Bergson’s thought in British philosophy after it was ferociously attacked by Bertrand Russell in 1912, and can provide more detailed contours on the joint fortunes of temporal experience and Bergson's thought in the history of twentieth-century philosophy. I conclude by emphasizing reasons why contemporary philosophers should pay particular attention to the three figures’ treatment of Bergson. (shrink)

Introduction to the first special issue of Bergsoniana, a new journal in Bergson studies.

C. D. Broad developed three different accounts of time over the course of his career. Emily Thomas has recently argued that the shift from the first to the second of these was motivated by his engagement with the philosophy of Samuel Alexander. In this paper, I argue that the shift from the second to the third was instigated by Broad’s engagement with precognitive dreams and with the thought of John William Dunne. Furthermore, I argue that fully appreciating Broad’s interest in (...) psychic research in general, and precognitions in particular, is required for understanding the theory of time he defended in the second volume of Examination of McTaggart’s Philosophy. I also argue that interpreting the Examination in light of Broad’s engagement with Dunne can help remove the inconsistencies in Broad’s third account. (shrink)

J. M. E. McTaggart’s (1866-1925) argument for the unreality of time, first published in 1908, set the decisive framework for discussions about time in 20th-century analytic philosophy. This chapter provides an outline of the argument and situates it within the wider context of McTaggart’s philosophical system. It then provides an overview of a critique of McTaggart’s philosophical views on time by Hilda Oakeley (1867-1950). Oakeley was McTaggart’s contemporary and her critiques—while firmly based within their shared commitment to idealism—prefigure many later (...) criticisms and problems faced by 20th-century philosophers of time. (shrink)

This paper provides a Bergsonian response to J.M.E. McTaggart’s argument for the unreality of time. McTaggart’s argument has been used as the primary framework for analytic discussions about time for over a hundred years. McTaggart argued that all events in time can be categorised in two ways: either using the A-series (whereby all events are ‘past,’ ‘present,’ or ‘future’) or the B-series (whereby two events are linked by the relation of ‘earlier’ and ‘later’). He argued that the A-series is contradictory (...) and that the B-series does not capture the nature of time. So he famously concluded that time is unreal. I demonstrate that McTaggart’s argument does not pay sufficient attention to the time of consciousness captured by Bergson’s durée. I show that two distinct temporal realms can be extracted from Bergson’s philosophy: (i) la durée and (ii) a mathematical time-ordering generally classified by analytic philosophers as the B-series. The A-series is shown to be an attempt to ‘have it all’ – to retain the features that apply only to the mathematical ordering (e.g., divisibility into distinct segments), but that also somehow contain only those features that apply to subjective temporal experience (e.g., the ‘flow’ of time). (shrink)

This paper argues that the possibility of revealing counterfactuals of creaturely freedom to agents in possible worlds forming part of God’s natural knowledge poses a new problem for Molinism. This problem best comes to light when considering the phenomenon of stubbornness, i.e., the conscious refusal of fulfilling the providential plan revealed to and intended for us by another agent. The reason why this problem has gone unnoticed is that the usual instances of prophecy dealt with by Molinists are highly specific (...) cases. These cases are special for three reasons: because the content of the revelations does not include the relevant counterfactuals of creaturely freedom, because the specific revelation plays no causal role in the immediate circumstances of the action that the agent is performing, and because the agent is not intent on consciously refusing the providential plan intended by the relevant counterfactual. I explore possible worlds where one or more of these three conditions do not obtain and demonstrate the consequences these possible worlds have for Molinists. (shrink)

This paper argues that idealism can offer a new solution to the problem of relating the “static” presence of things to eternity and the “dynamic” passage of reality in the temporal realm. I first offer a presentation of this problem using the dispute between Aquinas and Scotus, then describe “ontological idealism about time,” as a smaller–scale idealism, and show how it resolves the original problem. I conclude by demonstrating that this view is consonant with the recent emphasis on the ontological (...) dependence of things on God and that it offers a way of bringing together non–eternalist ontologies and the ontological conclusions posited by the special theory of relativity. (shrink)

The thesis uses key insights from the philosophy of Henri Bergson (1859-1941) to propose a new model of God’s relation to time. Chapter 1 is an introduction to Bergson’s philosophy against the background of Russell’s “The Philosophy of Bergson.” It provides an exposition of two key themes from Bergson central to my argument: the relation between time and space (Chapters 2-4) and the relation between free will and determinism (Chapter 5). Chapter 2 has a twofold task. First, it provides a (...) Bergsonian response to McTaggart’s argument for the unreality of time. Second, it uses the underlying metaphysics of McTaggart’s argument to demonstrate that two distinct temporal realms can be extracted from Bergson’s philosophy: (i) la durée and (ii) a mathematical time-ordering generally classified by analytic philosophy as the B-series. Chapter 3 relates this double-tier framework to temporal ontologies in analytic philosophy. I argue that such a framework supports an “ontological idealism about time.” I argue for relativizing temporal existence to distinct points or sets of points of spacetime that leads to a radical mind-dependence of temporal extension of objects. Chapter 4 explores how the durée-based ontology argued for in Chapter 3 impacts the relation between God and time. I argue that analytic philosophy has failed to capture key ontological facets of the God-time relation and that a return to divine “causal knowledge” is required. I demonstrate that the existence of temporal objects comes from two sources: (i) their mind-dependent temporal aspect and (ii) timeless divinely-created esse. Chapter 5 applies this framework to the problem of divine foreknowledge and human free will. I demonstrate that although Bergson’s theory can defend the existence of human freedom, his thought needs to be supplanted with divine “causal knowledge” to guarantee divine omniscience. (shrink)

Translators' Preface to three texts on Henri Bergson by Jan Patočka: "Review of 'Bergson' by Vladimir Jankélévitch"; "Preface to Henri Bergson, The Two Sources of Morality and Religion"; "Bergson" (encyclopedia entry).

The aim of this article is to reassess the similarity between Kripke’s metaphysics and Aquinas’ thought on truth, a similarity affirmed in Schultz-Aldrich’s Heythrop Journal article from 2009 and denied by Klima and Kerr in their analysis of Kripkean and Thomist accounts of essence. My claim is that this similarity has been insufficiently understood and its misunderstanding has closed off ways by means of which Aquinas’ thought can provide Kripkean epistemology with a component that it lacks.

In this paper, we argue that the French philosopher Henri Bergson was a hidden interlocutor in Susan Stebbing’s critique of Arthur Eddington in her Philosophy and the Physicists. First, we outline Stebbing’s critique of Eddington’s philosophical- physical writings with a particular emphasis on her case against Eddington’s account of the passage of time. Second, we provide evidence that Eddington’s philosophy is, at its core, Bergsonian and make the case that Eddington was directly influenced by Bergson’s philosophy of la durée. Third, (...) we lay out Stebbing’s critique of Bergsonism in her Pragmatism and French Voluntarism and identify important similarities with her critique of Eddington over twenty years later. In doing so, we show that it is Eddington’s Bergsonism that she is attacking. Finally, we situate Stebbing’s criticisms of both Eddington and Bergson within two wider conflicts that emerged in early twentieth century British philosophy: one between an objectively describable time of physics and subjective temporal experience, and the other between science and intuition. (shrink)

This paper explores a variety of perfect being theism that combines Yujin Nagasawa’s maximal God thesis with the view that God is not atemporal. We argue that the original maximal God thesis still implicitly relies on a “static” view of divine perfections. Instead, following the recent re-evaluation of divine immutability by analytic philosophers, we propose that thinking of divine great-making properties as fluctuating but nevertheless remaining maximal either for every time t or across all times strengthens the original maximal God (...) thesis. Furthermore, we show that “temporalising” Nagasawa’s maximal God and adopting what we call the fluctuating maximal God thesis provides more effective ways of responding to objections to perfect being theism, in particular, the argument from evil and some conceptual problems pertaining to the Incarnation. Finally, we demonstrate that our proposal is compatible with Christian Scriptures and coheres with numerous biblical passages better than Nagasawa’s original proposal does. (shrink)

Henri Bergson is usually considered to be a ‘continental’ philosopher. This stimulating book is an attempt to introduce his philosophy into contemporary analytic philosophy of religion. Therefore,...

If you were to list the perennial issues in philosophy, the nature of time would no doubt be on that list. The essays in the present volume all touch upon the problem of time. The volume includes four contributions from different perspectives within the history of philosophy of time.Jani Hakkarainen and Todd Ryan delve into David Hume's account of time. Hume thinks there can be no time without succession. Consequently, unchanging, steadfast objects do not have a duration. They are stationary, (...) not subject to any change. Although they lack a duration, they coexist with a temporal succession. This introduces a problem: What is the relation between unchanging objects and time? Hakkarainen and Ryan draw on what they call Hume's Principle of Quantitative Comparison. Each indivisible temporal extent is equal to any other temporal extent; differences in duration are due to the different number of temporal parts. Steadfast objects may be thought to undergo a certain number of calculable changes when they are compared to ordinary successions we experience. This experience is provided, for example, by the ticking of a clock. We have the capacity to think that steadfast objects have precise durations. We humans nevertheless cannot give any deep explanation as how we come to this conclusion.Emily Thomas focuses on the graphic representation of time. Whereas the visual representation of time has typically been done with matrices or grids, Joseph Priestley represented time in a line in 1765. Priestley's line divides time “by an equal scale” into centuries. Many have interpreted this as being evidence of a Newtonian influence, as if there is an absolute time flowing equably. Thomas situates Priestley's position in the modern debates on the nature of our ideas. She argues that the absolutist reading does not have merit. Thomas thinks rather that Priestley sides with David Hartley, who explained how we acquire the ideas of duration and time from sensation. Thomas's essay advances our understanding of the history of space-time parallelism. With timelines, the analogy between time and space becomes a possibility. In my essay I assess Ernst Mach's criticism of Isaac Newton's substantivalist account of time. Newton's argument for absolute time relates to his mathematical-empirical physics and theology. In his Science of Mechanics, Mach largely neglects the laws of motion, calculus and the omnipresence theology that is at the background of Newton's concept of time. Mach did however criticize Newton's absolutist argument on the basis that the self-existing flow cannot be observed, measured, or experimented with, and he provided an alternative relational account of time. I point out that this was not only extreme positivism or phenomenalism, but an epistemology and ontology suited for the subsequent physical theories of relativity. Finally, I argue that Mach's denial of the independent atomic structure of matter should not be entirely assimilated to his denial of substantivalism about time. The two phenomena are different, so we should evaluate Mach's reasoning concerning them accordingly. Matyáš Moravec and Peter West go through Susan Stebbing's criticism of Arthur Eddington's popular account of the passage of time. Stebbing's target, Moravec and West argue, is Eddington's largely Bergsonian view on time. She objects to the view that our minds have “a private door” to the physical reality which no measurements can disclose. Stebbing believes that our experience of the passage of time belongs to our ordinary, every-day experience, and she thinks Eddington mystifies the whole idea by leaning on a peculiar form of introspection. Moravec and West build a case for Bergson's influence on Eddington, arguing that Bergson probably did contribute to Eddington's idea of “the intuition of becoming.” Both seem to think that we may access the dynamic temporal reality in ways not captured by scientific investigation, by means of an introspective internal experience of duration. As a final remark, I think I should note, with regret, that out of the six authors in this volume only one is a woman. Let the reader know that as an editor I tried to strike a better balance. I still trust that the quality of the articles is high, and most importantly, worthwhile for readers interested in the history of philosophy of time. (shrink)

Machines will attain human levels of intelligence by the year 2040, predicts robotics expert Hans Moravec. And by 2050, they will have far surpassed us. In this mind-bending new book, Hans Moravec takes the reader on a roller coaster ride packed with such startling predictions. He tells us, for instance, that in the not-too-distant future, an army of robots will displace workers, causing massive, unprecedented unemployment. But then, says Moravec, a period of very comfortable existence will follow, (...) as humans benefit from a fully automated economy. And eventually, as machines evolve far beyond humanity, robots will supplant us. But if Moravec predicts the end of the domination by human beings, his is not a bleak vision. Far from railing against a future in which machines rule the world, Moravec embraces it, taking the startling view that intelligent robots will actually be our evolutionary heirs. "Intelligent machines, which will grow from us, learn our skills, and share our goals and values, can be viewed as children of our minds." And since they are our children, we will want them to outdistance us. In fact, in a bid for immortality, many of our descendants will choose to transform into "ex humans," as they upload themselves into advanced computers. We will become our children and live forever. In his provocative new book, the highly anticipated follow-up to his bestselling volume Mind Children, Moravec charts the trajectory of robotics in breathtaking detail. A must read for artificial intelligence, technology, and computer enthusiasts, Moravec's freewheeling but informed speculations present a future far different than we ever dared imagine. (shrink)

Computers have far to go to match human strengths, and our estimates will depend on analogy and extrapolation. Fortunately, these are grounded in the first bit of the journey, now behind us. Thirty years of computer vision reveals that 1 MIPS can extract simple features from real-time imagery--tracking a white line or a white spot on a mottled background. 10 MIPS can follow complex gray-scale patches--as smart bombs, cruise missiles and early self-driving vans attest. 100 MIPS can follow moderately unpredictable (...) features like roads--as recent long NAVLAB trips demonstrate. 1,000 MIPS will be adequate for coarse-grained three-dimensional spatial awareness--illustrated by several mid-resolution stereoscopic vision programs, including my own. 10,000 MIPS can find three-dimensional objects in clutter--suggested by several "bin-picking" and high-resolution stereo-vision demonstrations, which accomplish the task in an hour or so at 10 MIPS. The data fades there--research careers are too short, and computer memories too small, for significantly more elaborate experiments. (shrink)

_ Source: _Volume 62, Issue 1, pp 69 - 89 Galen’s physiology—his theory of elements, mixtures and the emergence of natural capacities—compels him to conceive of each part of the soul as a peculiar mixture of elementary qualities in the material substance of the organ in which it is located. The reason why Galen, nevertheless, refrains from making a dogmatic assertion about the substance of the soul, or of human nature in general, is the acknowledged failure to account for two (...) goal-directed activities—the formation of bodily organs and human intelligence—in terms of elementary qualities and their mixtures. (shrink)

Este breve ensayo complementa en aspectos esenciales la argumentación de mi libro Introducción a la filosofía de la vocación en la medida en que se analiza la experiencia de la vocación desde el punto de vista de la estética. Me centro en cinco preguntas con respecto a la obra de Felice Casorati titulada Vocation. Primero, partiendo del título de la obra en relación con la desnudez de la figura ilumino la diferencia entre una interpretación santa y profana. En el segundo (...) capítulo intento captar y describir el sujeto de la vocación, uno de las protagonistas de este drama. El tercer capítulo está dedicado a caracterizar el contexto de la vocación con atención especial a la esperanza. El siguiente punto trata del análisis de la experiencia temporal de la vocación. El quinto paso es un nuevo acercamiento a la pregunta más esencial: ¿quién es el que llama en la vocación? El último punto es una recogida de los resultados, es decir, aquellos aspectos esenciales que nos sirven como puntos orientativos para vivir y expresar mejor la vocación como pleno sentido de la existencia. (shrink)

In recent years the mushrooming power, functionality and ubiquity of computers and the Internet have outstripped early forecasts about technology's rate of advancement and usefulness in everyday life. Alert pundits now foresee a world saturated with powerful computer chips, which will increasingly insinuate themselves into our gadgets, dwellings, apparel and even our bodies.

Exploration and colonization of the universe await, but Earth‐adapted biological humans are ill equipped to respond to the challenge. Machines have gone farther and seen more, limited though they presently are by insect‐like behavioral inflexibility.

Exploration and colonization of the universe awaits, but earth-adapted biological humans are ill-equipped to respond to the challenge. Machines have gone farther and seen more, limited though they presently are by insect-like behavioral inflexibility. As they become smarter over the coming decades, space will be theirs. Organizations of robots of ever increasing intelligence and sensory and motor ability will expand and transform what they occupy, working with matter, space and time. As they grow, a smaller and smaller fraction of their (...) territory will be undeveloped frontier. Competitive success will depend more and more on using already available matter and space in ever more refined and useful forms. The process, analogous to the miniaturization that makes today's computers a trillion times more powerful than the mechanical calculators of the past, will gradually transform all activity from grossly physical homesteading of raw nature, to minimum-energy quantum transactions of computation. The final frontier will be urbanized, ultimately into an arena where every bit of activity is a meaningful computation: the inhabited portion of the universe will transformed into a cyberspace. (shrink)

The thoughts presented here never appeared in research proposals, but nevertheless grew at the Stanford University Artificial Intelligence Laboratory over the years 1971 through 1980 under support from the National Institutes of Health, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the National Science Foundation and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, and more recently at the Carnegie-Mellon University Robotics Institute under Office of Naval Research contract number N00014-81-K-0503.

Computers were invented recently to mechanize tedious manual informational procedures. Such procedures were themselves invented only during the last ten millennia, as agricultural civilizations outgrew village-scale social instincts. The instincts arose in our hominid ancestors during several million years of life in the wild, and were themselves built on perceptual and motor mechanisms that had evolved in a vertebrate lineage spanning hundreds of millions of years.

The evidence grid representation was formulated at the CMU Mobile Robot Laboratory in 1983 to turn wide angle range measurements from cheap mobile robot-mounted sonar sensors into detailed spatial maps. It accumulates diffuse evidence about the occupancy of a grid of small volumes of nearby space from individual sensor readings into increasingly confident and detailed maps of a robot's surroundings. It worked surprisingly well in first implementation for sonar navigation in cluttered rooms. In the past decade its use has been (...) extended to range measurements from stereoscopic vision and other sensors, sonar in very difficult specular environments, and other contexts. The most dramatic extension yet, from 2D grid maps with thousands of cells to 3D grids with millions, is underway. (shrink)

Senses evolved to when the world was wild, enabling our ancestors to detect subtle passing opportunities and dangers. Senses are less useful in a tamer world, where our interactions become more and more simple information exchanges. Senses, and the instincts using them, are increasingly liabilities, demanding entertainment rather than providing useful services. The anachronism will become more apparent as virtual realities, prosthetic sense organs and brain to computer interfaces become common. Imagine reading a computer screen if your eyes and visual (...) cortex are artificial prostheses. It would be far better to bypass all the sensory processing, and insert the message from the computer directly into the thinking portions of your brain. In such manner all our senses will become obsolete, as our physical environment is inexorably refined from a rough physical place into a densely interconnected cyberspace. (shrink)

_ Source: _Volume 62, Issue 1, pp 69 - 89 Galen’s physiology—his theory of elements, mixtures and the emergence of natural capacities—compels him to conceive of each part of the soul as a peculiar mixture of elementary qualities in the material substance of the organ in which it is located. The reason why Galen, nevertheless, refrains from making a dogmatic assertion about the substance of the soul, or of human nature in general, is the acknowledged failure to account for two (...) goal-directed activities—the formation of bodily organs and human intelligence—in terms of elementary qualities and their mixtures. (shrink)

In Quaestiones 1.3 and 2.14, Alexander presents a distinctly realist or essentialist view of the objects of definition, distinguished, on the one hand, from two types of realism rejected by Aristotle, and, on the other, from two types of conceptualism that probably belong within the Peripatetic tradition. The difference between Alexander’s view and essentialist abstractivism lies in his understanding of definienda not as the common concepts of things existing in the particulars, but as the common things conceived of as existing (...) in the particulars. This paper offers a close reading of Quaest. 1.3, whose aim is to flesh out Alexander’s position vis-à-vis the objects of definition against the backdrop of the four rejected alternatives. The distinction between Alexander’s essentialism and the essentialist abstractivist notion of definienda is further explained in light of Quaest. 2.14. The amended Greek text of Quaest. 1.3 is appended with an English translation. (shrink)

The so-called eighth _Stromateus_ is a series of excerpts on inquiry, demonstration, scepticism, and causal theory, made or adopted by Clement of Alexandria. This book provides a translation and commentary of the text and a study of its origin and purpose.

Very encouraging results have been obtained from a new program that derives a dense three-dimensional evidence grid representation of a robot's surroundings from wide-angle stereoscopic images. The pro gram adds several spatial rays of evidence to a grid for each of about 2,500 local image features chosen per stereo pair. It was used to construct a 256x256x64 grid, representing 6 by 6 by 2 meters, from a hand- collected test set of twenty stereo image pairs of an office scene. Fifty (...) nine stereo pairs of an 8 by 8 meter laboratory were also processed. The positive (probably occupied) cells of the grids, viewed in perspec tive, resemble dollhouse scenes. Details as small as the curvature of chair armrests are discernible. The processing time, on a 100 MIPS Sparc 20, is less than five seconds per stereo pair, and total memory is under 16 megabytes. The results seem abundantly adequate for very reliable navigation of freely roaming mobile robots, and plausibly adequate for shape identification of objects bigger than 10 centimeters. The program is a first proof of concept, and awaits optimizations, enhancements, variations, extensions and applications. (shrink)

It is the year 20-something--we don't know the exact date yet, but figure 20 to 50 years from today--and your doctor has just given you some really bad news. That nasty little pain in your lower abdomen turns out be serious. The doctor explains to you with great tact and kindness that, although medicine can now fix almost everything that can go wrong with the human body, there remain one or two really ferocious ailments that cannot be cured. You won't (...) be in pain, he says. You won't even be bedridden, except at the very end--but the fact is that you have just six months left to live. (shrink)

I investigate the complex relationship between politics and philosophy by focusing on the notion of testimony. I argue that there is a necessary and fruitful tension between sapiential and political life. Testimony is characterized here as a free value-response in an intersubjective relation that requires empathy on both sides of the communication. This act of affirming a truth or value goes beyond the limits of prudent self-realization and self-preservation: authentic testimony requires some kind of self-sacrifice. I contrast this general image (...) of testimony to Jan Patočka’s interpretation of «care for the soul». Patočka, by following the early Husserl’s renewal of philosophy, managed to establish and to preserve the harmony between theory and praxis even during persecution of the communist regime. His courageous acts come close to and illuminate the testimony of Edith Stein, who set the measure for philosophical authenticity and self-donation. The comparison of these two testimonies helps to elaborate the notion of exemplary sapiential life — a highly relevant notion for politics. (shrink)

Determining what has gone wrong in a malfunctioning body and proposing an effective treatment requires expertise. Since antiquity, philosophers and doctors have wondered what sort of knowledge this expertise involves, and whether and how it can warrant its conclusions. Few people were as qualified to deal with these questions as Galen of Pergamum. A practising doctor with a keen interest in logic and natural science, he devoted much of his enormous literary output to the task of putting medicine on firm (...) methodological grounds. At the same time he reflected on philosophical issues entailed by this project, such as the nature of experience, its relation to reason, the criteria of truth, and the methods of justification. This volume explores Galen's contributions to epistemology, as they arise in the specific inquiries and polemics of his works, as well as their legacy in the Islamic world. (shrink)

The unprecedented opportunities for experiments in complexity presented by the first modern computers in the late 1940's raised hopes in early computer scientists (eg. John von Neumann and Alan Turing) that the ability to think, our greatest asset in our dealings with the world, might soon be understood well enough to be duplicated. Success in such an endeavor would extend mankind's mind in the same way that the development of energy machinery extended his muscles.

The article is an analysis of a chapter dealing with the Aristotelian categories in the so-called eighth book of Stromata by Clement of Alexandria, a collection of notes from a philosophical source (or sources) concerned with the theory of demonstration and related issues. Though seldom mentioned in contemporary scholarship, this short chapter is a valuable testimony of the reception of the Categories in the philosophy of the Imperial period and before the time of Alexander of Aphrodisias. After a brief survey (...) of its contents, the article investigates parallels in philosophical literature and explores the function of the chapter within the larger context of Stromata VIII. In the final section the question of Clement's source is addressed. Drawing on earlier research concerning other parts of the eighth book, the article argues that in this case, too, Galen's lost writing on demonstration is a likely candidate. (shrink)

The last few years have been good for time machines. Kip Thorne's renowned general relativity group at Caltech invented a new quantum gravitational approach to building a time gate, and, in an international collaboration, gave a plausible rebuttal of "grandfather paradox" arguments against time travel. Another respected group suggested time machines that exploit quantum mechanical time uncertainty. The technical requirements for these suggestions exceed our present capabilities, but each new approach seems less onerous than the last. There is hope yet (...) that time travel will eventually become possible, even cheap. (shrink)

Folk psychology is under threat - that is to say - our everyday conception that human beings are agents who experience the world in terms of sights, sounds, tastes, smells and feelings and who deliberate, make plans, and generally execute actions on the basis of their beliefs, needs and wants - is under threat. This threat is evidenced in intellectual circles by the growing attitude amongst some cognitive scientists that our common sense categories are in competition with connectionist theories and (...) modern neuroscience. It is often thought that either folk psychology or modern cognitive science must go. It is in these terms that the battle lines of today's philosophy of mind are drawn. (shrink)

This paper describes some components of a working system which drives a vehicle through cluttered real world environments under computer control, guided by images perceived through an onboard television camera. The emphasis is on reliable and fast low level visual techniques which determine the existence and location of objects in the world, but do not identify them. They include an interest operator for choosing distinctive regions in images, a correlator for finding matching regions in similar images, a geometric camera solver (...) which determines camera displacement and distance to objects from motion stereo information and an automatic distortion corrector which compensates for camera imperfections. (shrink)