WALTER BURLEIGH, Von der Reinheit der Kunst der Logik. Erster Traktat: Von den Eigenschaften der Termini. Übersetzt und mit Einfuhrung und Anmerkungen herausgegeben von Peter Kunze. Lateinisch-deut...

H. BRANDS, 'Cogito ergo sum'. Interpretationen von Kant bis Nietzsche. Freiburg (Breisgau)/Miinchen: Karl Alber Verlag 1982. 318 Seiten. DM 54.

Übersetzt und mit Einfuhrung und Anmerkungen herausgegeben von Peter Kunze. Lateinisch-deutsch. (Philosophische Bibliothek, Nr. 401.) Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1988. xlvii + 269 pp. 64 DM.

The text of the tract De arcubus similibus was published for the first time by M. Curtze in 1887. However, after examining some more Latin manuscripts and the Arabic MS Oxford, Bodleian Library, Marsh 663 it appeared, that Curtze's edition was rather an adaptation. Also Curtze's suggestion that Jordanus Nemorarius was the author was very probably wrong. The author of the tract was the Egyptian mathematician Ahmed ibn Jusuf as appears from the Latin manuscripts, and its translator, very probably, Gerard (...) of Cremona. In the tract Ahmed tried to prove, that the assertion ‘similar arcs are also equal arcs’ was wrong . His starting points were the propositions Euclid III, 20 and 21. Consequently, the tract can be looked upon as a commentary on the third book of the Elements. (shrink)

ZusammenfassunuIn dem vorliegenden Bericht über einige Arbeiten des Verfassers und eine daran anschliessende Arbeit von G. Emde, Marburg, wird eine Reihe von Ergebnissen behandelt, die die Kombinationen der Grundmodalitäten « Möglichkeit » und « Notwendigkeit » betreffen. Ausgehend von sehr allgemeinen Rahmenkodifikaten wird die durch Basisreduktion zu gewinnende Liste der endlich vielen implikativen Modalitätenlogiken mit idempotenter Möglichkeit erörtert; bei wichtigen Unterklassen der nicht notwendig idempotenten implikativen Modalitätenlogiken treten neben der Basisreduktion vor allem spezielle Entscheidungsprobleme in den Vordergrund.RésuméDans le rapport ci‐dessus (...) concernant quelques travaux de l'auteur et le travail de M. G. Emde qui s'y rapporte, il s'agit d'un ensemble de résultats sur la combinaison des modalités fondamentales de « possibilité» et de « nécessité». Partant de quelques codifications cadres très générales, I'auteur discute la liste en nombre fini des logiques modales implicatives à« possibilité» idempotente, une liste qui est obtenue par une réduction des bases. Quant à certaines sous‐classes importantes des logiques implicatives qui ne sont pas nécessairement idempotentes, outre la réduction des bases, les problèmes de décision qui leur sont spéciaux, se trouvent placés au premier plan.In the present report on some papers of the author and on a sequel to them by G. Emde, Marburg, a series of results concerning the combination of the basic modalities « possibility » and « necessity » are treated. Starting from some very general framing‐codifications, the list of the finitely many implicative modal logics with idempotent « possibility » which is obtainable through basis reduction is discussed. Besides basis reduction, in the case of some important subclasses of the not‐necessarily‐idempotent implicative modal logics, attention is given to the special decision problems. (shrink)

MICHAEL D. RESNIK, Frege and the philosophy of mathematics. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1980. 244 pp. $16.50. HANS D. SLUGA, Gottlob Frege. London, Boston and Henley: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980. xi + 203 pp. £ 12.95.

Intent and mitigating circumstances play a central role in moral and legal assessments in large-scale industrialized societies. Al- though these features of moral assessment are widely assumed to be universal, to date, they have only been studied in a narrow range of societies. We show that there is substantial cross-cultural variation among eight traditional small-scale societies (ranging from hunter-gatherer to pastoralist to horticulturalist) and two Western societies (one urban, one rural) in the extent to which intent and mitigating circumstances influence (...) moral judgments. Although participants in all societies took such factors into account to some degree, they did so to very different extents, varying in both the types of considerations taken into account and the types of violations to which such considerations were applied. The particular patterns of assessment characteristic of large-scale industrialized societies may thus reflect relatively recently culturally evolved norms rather than inherent features of human moral judgment. (shrink)

Patient centred diagnosis is best practised through shared decision making; an iterative dialogue between doctor and patient, whichrespects a patient’s needs, values, preferences, and circumstances. -/- Shared decision making for diagnostic situations differs fundamentally from that for treatment decisions. This has important implications when considering its practical application. -/- The nature of dialogue should be tailored to the specific diagnostic decision; scenarios with higher stakes or uncertainty usually require more detailed conversations.

Last October the German Ambassador to Britain delivered the annual Gresham Special Lecture in Gresham College in the City of London. The text of His Excellency's lecture is reproduced here with permission.

Editors’ Note: As a matter of policy, the editors believe that publishing several reviews of selected texts is a valuable exercise which will enable a cross-section of views to be aired.Copies of this report can be obtained from the Nuffield Council on Bioethics, 28 Bedford Square, London WC1B 3EG, U.K. . The report publishes the recommendation of a Working Party set up in January 1995. Following a wide public consultation, the Working Party prepared its report on xenotransplantation which has been (...) endorsed by the Nuffield Council on Bioethics. (shrink)

The Repugnant Conclusion served an important purpose in catalyzing and inspiring the pioneering stage of population ethics research. We believe, however, that the Repugnant Conclusion now receives too much focus. Avoiding the Repugnant Conclusion should no longer be the central goal driving population ethics research, despite its importance to the fundamental accomplishments of the existing literature.

Decades of research conducted in Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, & Democratic (WEIRD) societies have led many scholars to conclude that the use of mental states in moral judgment is a human cognitive universal, perhaps an adaptive strategy for selecting optimal social partners from a large pool of candidates. However, recent work from a more diverse array of societies suggests there may be important variation in how much people rely on mental states, with people in some societies judging accidental harms just (...) as harshly as intentional ones. To explain this variation, we develop and test a novel cultural evolutionary theory proposing that the intensity of kin-based institutions will favor less attention to mental states when judging moral violations. First, to better illuminate the historical distribution of the use of intentions in moral judgment, we code and analyze anthropological observations from the Human Area Relations Files. This analysis shows that notions of strict liability—wherein the role for mental states is reduced—were common across diverse societies around the globe. Then, by expanding an existing vignette-based experimental dataset containing observations from 321 people in a diverse sample of 10 societies, we show that the intensity of a society's kin-based institutions can explain a substantial portion of the population-level variation in people's reliance on intentions in three different kinds of moral judgments. Together, these lines of evidence suggest that people's use of mental states has coevolved culturally to fit their local kin-based institutions. We suggest that although reliance on mental states has likely been a feature of moral judgment in human communities over historical and evolutionary time, the relational fluidity and weak kin ties of today's WEIRD societies position these populations' psychology at the extreme end of the global and historical spectrum. (shrink)

The spatial dynamics of the optical emission from an array of 50 times 50 individual microcavity plasma devices is investigated. The array is operated in argon and argon-neon mixtures close to atmospheric pressure with an ac voltage. The optical emission is analysed with phase and space resolution. It has been found that the emission is not continuous over the entire ac period, but occurs once per half period. Each of the observed emission phases shows a self-pulsing of the discharge, with (...) several bursts of emission of fixed width and repetition rate. The number of emission bursts depends on applied voltage and frequency. Spatially resolved measurements prove that the emission bursts are formed by overlapping emission pulses from single discharge cavities. Intensity differences between positive and negative half-wave can be interpreted through spatially resolved measurements of single discharge cavities. (shrink)