The founder of the eponymous engineering firm, which continues to realize seminal projects around the world, Ove Arup is widely acknowledged as one of the most significant engineers of his time. Generated over the course of his illustrious career, these lectures, essays, and interviews broadlyshare several themes: insight into Arup's thinking on the nature of good design, quality and value in the built environment, and the growing need for better collaboration between engineers, architects, and contractors in order to (...) exploit technological advances in materials and methods, while at the same time reducing the environmental impact of building. These chronologically arranged essays span five decades, and many of the themes they address are as relevant today as they were when first produced. Illustrating wisdom, practical problem solving, and Arup's philosophical approach, this book is a necessary and long-overdue addition to the library of anyone who has a passion for, and an interest in, the principles of great design. (shrink)

It has been suggested that many philosophical theses—physicalism, normative naturalism, phenomenalism, and so on—should be understood in terms of ground. Against this, Ted Sider (2011) has argued that ground is ill-suited for this purpose. Here I develop Sider’s objection and offer a response. In doing so I develop a view about the role of ground in philosophy, and about the content of these distinctively philosophical theses.

Much recent metaphysics is built around notions such as naturalness, fundamentality, grounding, dependence, essence, and others besides. In this article I raise a problem for this kind of metaphysics, the “problem of missing value.” I survey a number of possible solutions to the problem and find them all wanting. This suggests a return to a kind of Goodmanian view that the world is a structureless mess onto which we project our own categorizations, not something with categories already built in.

Symmetries in physics are a guide to reality. That much is well known. But what is less well known is why symmetry is a guide to reality. What justifies inferences that draw conclusions about reality from premises about symmetries? I argue that answering this question reveals that symmetry is an epistemic notion twice over. First, these inferences must proceed via epistemic lemmas: premises about symmetries in the first instance justify epistemic lemmas about our powers of detection, and only from those (...) epistemic lemmas can we draw conclusions about reality. Second, in order to justify those epistemic lemmas, the notion of symmetry must be defined partly in epistemic terms. 1 Symmetry-to-Reality Reasoning1.1 A rough introduction to symmetry1.2 The symmetry-to-reality inference1.3 Two questions1.4 Two answers1.5 Preliminary clarifications2 Against Redundancy2.1 Redundancy2.2 Is absolute velocity redundant?2.3 Some redundancies3 Against Objectivity4 From Symmetry to Detection4.1 The epistemic approach4.2 The Occamist norm4.3 From symmetry to detection5 The Meaning of ‘Symmetry’5.1 A framework5.2 Formal definitions5.3 Ontic definitions6 Epistemic Definitions6.1 Taking observation seriously6.2 How things look6.3 Observation sentences6.4 Observational equivalence7 Symmetry as an Epistemic Notion 7.1 Observational equivalence and metaphysics7.2 The Occamist norm revisted7.3 Consequences8 Conclusion. (shrink)

This paper argues that ground is irreducibly plural: a group of facts can be grounded together, as a collective, even though no member of the group has a ground on its own. This kind of plural grounding is applied to the metaphysics of individuals and quantities, yielding a “structuralist” view in each case. Some more general implications of plural grounding are also discussed.

The Principle of Sufficient Reason states that everything has an explanation. But different notions of explanation yield different versions of this principle. Here a version is formulated in terms of the notion of a “grounding” explanation. Its consequences are then explored, with particular emphasis on the fact that it implies necessitarianism, the view that every truth is necessarily true. Finally, the principle is defended from a number of objections, including objections to necessitarianism. The result is a defense of a “rationalist” (...) metaphysics, one that constitutes an alternative to the contemporary dogmas that some aspects of the world are “metaphysically brute” and that the world could in so many ways have been different. (shrink)

In Human Well-Being and the Natural Environment, Partha Dasgupta explores ways to measure the quality of life. In developing quality-of-life indices, he pays particular attention to the natural environment, illustrating how it can be incorporated, more generally, into economic reasoning in a seamless manner. Professor Dasgupta puts the theory that he develops to use in extended commentaries on the economics of population, poverty traps, global warming, structural adjustment programmes, and free trade, particularly in relation to poor countries. The (...) result is a treatise that goes beyond quality-of-life measures and offers a comprehensive account of the newly emergent subject of ecological economics. (shrink)

ABSTRACT In this essay, I shall discuss Gadamer’s interpretation of Celan’s dialogical poetry in his essay “Wer bin Ich und wer bist Du?” (“Who am I and Who are You?”). One may argue that this is Gadamer’s articulation of the problem of the self-other relationship. To understand the question of self and other, it is first of all necessary to return to the poetic word from which the question arises. Speaking is, for Gadamer, the most profoundly self-forgetful action, because when (...) one speaks, one is so deeply “within the word” that one is not turned toward the word but, rather, to what one wants to say with the word. For hermeneutics, interpreting means putting oneself on the task of the poetic text. The proximity between poetizing and interpreting emerges, also in its specificity concerning the proximity between poetizing and thinking. Such a proximity, in turn, divides itself into two extremes: the word that sublates itself, and the word that stands for itself. It is hence the uncertain fullness of language, where, unsurprisingly, both poetizing and interpreting come into themselves, which constitutes the link between the one and the other. Therefore, the interpreted word, intertwined with the poetic word does not replace what it indicates, but merely points beyond itself, to what is other than itself. Both pursue a meaning that points toward an open realm. (shrink)

The paper is an attempt to revisit Rawls’ idea of a self, which elicits the concept of justice in the liberal tradition. Justice, as understood in the social and political context, is the basic feature of a well-ordered and rationally developed society and it is considered to be a virtue of the social institution. The liberal theory believes in the basic principle that right is prior to the good, and what is most fundamental to our personhood are not the ends (...) we choose but our capacity to choose them. Hence, in Rawls’ account of the self, absoluteness of the metaphysical priority has an edge over the absoluteness of the moral priority. The idea of an unencumbered self, in the social and historical sense, is at the core of the Kantian-Rawlsian theory of justice, which is under attack by the communitarians. Communitarians like Sandel, however, questions Rawls’ claim for the priority of right over good and maintains that liberals fail to recognize the self is ‘embedded,’ in and partly constituted by communal commitments and values which are objects of choice. In this paper, I examine communitarian critiques of Rawls’ liberal self. Further, I also refer to Rawls’ turn to the ‘political,’ which works as a ‘module’ that fits into and can be supported by a variety of reasonable comprehensive doctrines. (shrink)

Substantivalism is the view that space exists in addition to any material bodies situated within it. Relationalism is the opposing view that there is no such thing as space; there are just material bodies, spatially related to one another. This paper assesses this issue in the context of classical physics. It starts by describing the bucket argument for substantivalism. It then turns to anti-substantivalist arguments, including Leibniz's classic arguments and their contemporary reincarnation under the guise of ‘symmetry’. It argues that (...) these anti-substantivalist arguments are stronger than is often acknowledged. (shrink)

What happens at the end of a clinical trial for an investigational neural implant? It may be surprising to learn how difficult it is to answer this question. While new trials are initiated with increasing regularity, relatively little consensus exists on how best to conduct them, and even less on how to ethically end them. The landscape of recent neural implant trials demonstrates wide variability of what happens to research participants after an neural implant trial ends. Some former research participants (...) continue to receive support for their devices (e.g., battery and component replacements, software updates, etc.). Others, when safe, have their neural implants removed through surgical explantation. Still others continue to live with a deactivated neural implant embedded in their body. In the United States, there are no uniform requirements to provide services, of any kind, after an neural implant study ends, and other nations are similarly facing this challenge. The existence of a post-trial gap in an expanding neural implant research ecosystem invites obvious questions: What is owed to neural implant research participants post-trial, and why has providing it been so difficult to accomplish in practice? To take a step forward on this difficult issue, we assembled one group of stakeholders – researchers funded for neuroethics grants by the National Institutes of Health – to explore possible starting points on one topic: ethical guidance for post-trial care of research participants in neural implant trials. Based on shared concerns discussed in the expert workshop the current paper is a call to action. It reports the key areas of convergence from the meeting and highlights important next steps towards developing much needed guidance. (shrink)

As modern deep networks become more complex, and get closer to human‐like capabilities in certain domains, the question arises as to how the representations and decision rules they learn compare to the ones in humans. In this work, we study representations of sentences in one such artificial system for natural language processing. We first present a diagnostic test dataset to examine the degree of abstract composable structure represented. Analyzing performance on these diagnostic tests indicates a lack of systematicity in representations (...) and decision rules, and reveals a set of heuristic strategies. We then investigate the effect of training distribution on learning these heuristic strategies, and we study changes in these representations with various augmentations to the training set. Our results reveal parallels to the analogous representations in people. We find that these systems can learn abstract rules and generalize them to new contexts under certain circumstances—similar to human zero‐shot reasoning. However, we also note some shortcomings in this generalization behavior—similar to human judgment errors like belief bias. Studying these parallels suggests new ways to understand psychological phenomena in humans as well as informs best strategies for building artificial intelligence with human‐like language understanding. (shrink)

This article argues that extended school closures during the Covid-19 pandemic were a moral catastrophe. It focuses on closures in the United States of America and discusses their effect on the pandemic, their harmful effects on children, and other morally relevant factors. It concludes by discussing how these closures came to pass and suggests that the root cause was structural, not individual: the relevant decision-makers were working in an institutional setting that stacked the deck heavily in favor of extended closures.

We give an axiomatic characterization for complete elementary extensions, that is, elementary extensions of the first-order structure consisting of all finitary relations and functions on the underlying set. Such axiom systems have been studied using various types of primitive notions . Our system uses the notion of partial functions as primitive. Properties of nonstandard extensions are derived from five axioms in a rather algebraic way, without the use of metamathematical notions such as formulas or satisfaction. For example, when applied to (...) the real number system, it provides a complete framework for developing nonstandard analysis based on hyperreals without having to construct them and without any use of logic. This has possible pedagogical and expository applications as presented in, e.g., [5], [6]. © 2011 WILEY-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim. (shrink)

The term ?boson? appears in almost all discussions on elementary particles and carries a reference to the name of Satyendra Nath Bose, the co-founder of quantum statistics. Yet, in spite of this wide use of a term coined after his name, Bose himself remains a shadowy figure in the history of science. This article is an attempt to reconstruct how Bose arrived at the statistics for which he is now remembered, and his subsequent two-year brief role in international science. Through (...) the lens of Bose's practice, I seek to grasp the contexts of those peripheral scientists who enter the practice of science from outside of the main group, and yet somehow manage to create a lasting contribution within it. (shrink)

Sometimes, ignorance is inexpressible. Lewis recognized this when he argued, in “Ramseyan Humility,” that we cannot know which property occupies which causal role. This peculiar state of ignorance arises in a number of other domains too, including ignorance about our position in space and the identities of individuals. In these cases, one does not know something, and yet one cannot give voice to one's ignorance in a certain way. But what does the ignorance in these cases consist in? This essay (...) argues that many standard models of ignorance cannot account for the phenomenon of inexpressible ignorance. It then develops an alternative model that does better, on which the ignorance consists in a failure to identify something by way of its nature or essence. (shrink)

_Current Controversies in Philosophy of Science_ asks twelve philosophers to debate six questions that are driving contemporary work in this area of philosophy. But each question also leads readers back to more general issues and shows how these general issues play out in contemporary debates. The result is a book that’s perfect for the advanced student, building up her knowledge of the foundations of the field while also engaging with its cutting-edge questions. Preliminary descriptions of each chapter, annotated bibliographies for (...) each controversy, study questions, and a supplemental guide to further controversies in philosophy of science help provide clearer and richer snapshots of active controversies for all readers. (shrink)

Urbanization affects concurrent human-animal interactions as a result of altered resource availability and land use pattern, which leads to considerable ecological consequences. While some animals have lost their habitat due to urban encroachment, few of them managed to survive within the urban ecosystem by altering their natural behavioral patterns. The feeding repertoire of folivorous colobines, such as gray langur, largely consists of plant parts. However, these free-ranging langurs tend to be attuned to the processed high-calorie food sources to attain maximum (...) benefits within the concrete jungle having insignificant greenery. Therefore, besides understanding their population dynamics, the effective management of these urbanized, free-ranging, non-human primate populations also depends on their altered feeding habits. Here, we have used a field-based experimental setup that allows gray langurs to choose between processed and unprocessed food options, being independent of any inter-specific conflicts over resources due to food scarcity. The multinomial logit model reveals the choice-based decision-making of these free-ranging gray langurs in an urban settlement of West Bengal, India, where they have not only learned to recognize the human-provisioned processed food items as an alternative food source but also shown a keen interest in it. However, such a mismatch between the generalized feeding behavior of folivorous colobines and their specialized gut physiology reminds us of Liem's paradox and demands considerable scientific attention. While urbanization imposes tremendous survival challenges to these animals, it also opens up for various alternative options for surviving in close proximity to humans which is reflected in this study, and could guide us for the establishment of a sustainable urban ecosystem in the future. (shrink)