Original essays by philosophers of language and philosophers of time exploring the semantics and metaphysics of tense.

The precarious rights of senior citizens, especially those who are highly educated and who are expected to counsel and guide the younger generations, has stimulated the creation internationally of advocacy associations and opinion leader groups. The strength of these groups, however, varies from country to country. In some countries, they are supported and are the focus of intense interest; in others, they are practically ignored. For this is reason we believe that the creation of a network of all these associations (...) is essential. The proposed network would act as a support for the already-existing policies of the United Nations’ High Commission for Human Rights, of independent experts, and of the Global Alliance for the Rights of Older People. All three have long ago recommended the creation of a recognized instrument for uniting presently scattered efforts. The proposed network, therefore, will seek to promote the international exchange of relevant expertise, and it will reinforce the commitments and actions that single countries are currently taking to meet these objectives. For example, informative public events can be organised to promote particular support initiatives and to provide an opportunity for new members of the network to be presented. The network will promote health for senior citizens, disease prevention, senior mobility, safe free time for seniors, alimentary education, protection against new risks and dangers, as well as equity in the services necessary for seniors to adopt new information and communication technologies. In the case of retired academic members, the network will promote equality with respect to continuing use of digital technologies (particularly email), continuing access to research libraries, and the guaranteed ability for seniors to fund their own research programs and to deliver free seminars. (shrink)

The theological teachings of John Philoponus are important for several reasons: a) to see the real achievements and influences of Aristotelian logic in regard to theology, b) to see the real consequences of not accepting hypostasis as relational and ontologically based and c) to assess the real consequences of such teachings for Triadology and Christology.

On October 18-19, 2002, the Center for Philosophical Education at Santa Barbara City College hosted a symposium honoring Professor Adolf Grünbaum’s contributions to contemporary philosophy. This work, an outgrowth of that symposium, contains essays by leading philosophers on Grünbaum's vast influence on philosophy of religion and philosophy of science. The symposium participants have either significantly reworked their original papers or written entirely new ones for this special publication. A reprint of Grünbaum’s "The Poverty of Theistic Cosmology" further enriches the book. (...) A highlight of the present volume is an extended "Autobiographical-Philosophical Narrative" in which Grünbaum traces his intellectual journey, beginning with a poignant account of his early experiences with anti-Semitism in Nazi Germany and his initial queries about religious belief, continuing through the major milestones of his career, and concluding with his current interests. Also of great value is a complete bibliography of Grünbaum's published works. Besides Grünbaum, the contributors include Nancy Murphy, Bas C. van Fraassen, Michael Tooley, Steven Humphrey, Nancy Cartwright, and Edward Erwin. (shrink)

A sequence x=xn:nω of elements of a complete Boolean algebra converges to a priori if lim infx=lim supx=b. The sequential topology τs on is the maximal topology on such that x→b implies x→τsb, where →τs denotes the convergence in the space — the a posteriori convergence. These two forms of convergence, as well as the properties of the sequential topology related to forcing, are investigated. So, the a posteriori convergence is described in terms of killing of tall ideals on ω, (...) and it is shown that the a posteriori convergence is equivalent to the a priori convergence iff forcing by does not produce new reals. A property of c.B.a.’s, satisfying -cc -cc and providing an explicit definition of the a posteriori convergence, is isolated. Finally, it is shown that, for an arbitrary c.B.a. , the space is sequentially compact iff the algebra has the property and does not produce independent reals by forcing, and that implies P is the unique sequentially compact c.B.a. in the class of Suslin forcing notions. (shrink)

In this paper we present two families of probability logics (denoted _QLP_ and \(QLP^{ORT}\) ) suitable for reasoning about quantum observations. Assume that \(\alpha \) means “O = a”. The notion of measuring of an observable _O_ can be expressed using formulas of the form \(\square \lozenge \alpha \) which intuitively means “if we measure _O_ we obtain \(\alpha \) ”. In that way, instead of non-distributive structures (i.e., non-distributive lattices), it is possible to relay on classical logic extended with (...) the corresponding modal laws for the modal logic \({\textbf{B}}\). We consider probability formulas of the form \(CS_{z_{1},\rho _{1}; \ldots ; z_{m},\rho _{m}} \square \lozenge \alpha \) related to an observable _O_ and a possible world (vector) _w_: if _a_ is an eigenvalue of _O_, \(w_{1}\),..., \(w_{m}\) form a base of a closed subspace of the considered Hilbert space which corresponds to eigenvalue _a_, and if _w_ is a linear combination of the basis vectors such that \(w=c_{1}\cdot w_{1}+ \cdots + c_{m}\cdot w_{m}\) for some \(c_{i}\in {\mathbb {C}}\), then \(\Vert c_{1}-z_{1}\Vert \le \rho _{1}\),..., \(\Vert c_{m}-z_{m}\Vert \le \rho _{m}\), and the probability of obtaining _a_ while measuring _O_ in the state _w_ is equal to \(\Sigma _{i=1}^{m}\Vert c_{i}\Vert ^{2}\). Formulas are interpreted in reflexive and symmetric Kripke models equipped with probability distributions over families of subsets of possible worlds that are orthocomplemented lattices, while for \(QLP^{ORT}\) also satisfy ortomodularity. We give infinitary axiomatizations, prove the corresponding soundness and strong completeness theorems, and also decidability for _QLP_-logics. (shrink)

The basis of Muslim philosophy and science is the instruction embedded in the Quran. At an early date this tradition was enlarged and strengthened by the infiltration into Muslim culture of Greek philosophy and science through the translation of Greek classics by Muslims. The Indian tradition of thought also made its contribution. This book traces the development and interaction of these strands in Muslim thinking. The author is concerned to show both how philosophy and science are related to specifically religious (...) thought, and how they have made distinctive contributions to method and discovery. (shrink)

Designed as a companion to the study of apologetics and philosophy of religion, this pocket dictionary by C. Stephen Evans offers 300 entries covering terms, apologists, philosophers, movements, apologetic arguments and theologies.

C.S. Lewis was a major public intellectual in Britain, beginning from the late 1930s and continuing to his death in 1963. In both his non-fiction, especially The Abolition of Man, and his fiction, most importantly in That Hideous Strength, he offers a critique of rationalism and scientism that is often strikingly similar to those that Michael Oakeshott penned in the late 1940s and early 1950s. This essay examines the question to what extent this similarity is merely superficial, and to what (...) extent the two writers shared a similar basis for their views. Furthermore, it examines whether there is an actual thread of influence: had Oakeshott been reading Lewis before writing his critique of rationalism, and if so, to what extent did Lewis’s work inform Oakeshott’s? (shrink)

This PhD responds to a two fold problem with the philosophy of design and the practice of design. The philosophical problem is stated as the discrepancy between a dominant philosophical framework that orders the world according to eternal essences and the actual conditions of the world in which we exist: the conditions of becoming and of flux. Commencing with a critique of the western metaphysical tradition of statics this research project proposes that we need to find a way of describing (...) an evolutionary model of practice, and by so doing to provide a revitalised narration of process. Consequently, the PhD explores the meanings of process through a critical examination of an ensemble of projects created by the author. Within this framework, a number of questions are posed in order to explore the proposition of a process practice. These questions are: What is process? How does one think process? Indeed, how do we get to grasp change? What are the consequences of process thinking on the practices of design, their fields of operation, and their productions? And, how can the thematising of process contribute to the design of the constructed environment, as well as reconfigure the practices of design? This thematising of process is argued to involve a necessary address to the constitutive and interrelated characteristics of process: space/time, movement, change, form and matter. Such an address is also seen to problematise the status of the object, the paradigms of representation, the modes of creation, the economies of exchange, and the structures of community, and to offer a modality of practice which would re-imagine the forms of social exchange to offer an ethical alternative to the tyranny of supply and demand, and thereby reconfigure the potential for dwelling. Making an overview of the discourses and practices engaging with theories of becoming, this thesis argues that almost all of these re-inscribe statics and that consequently the practice of design seems to drag behind our understanding of the world. Through a meditation on dis/appearance, in which the dynamics of being and becoming and the restless ambiguity of the gap are examined, the work establishes a process vocabulary, and makes clear through a material practice, the domains of process thinking, its inclinations, and the kinds of operations and procedures that flourish there. Foregrounding the fertile character of process practice, the PhD then proceeds to introduce notions of the movement-form, the duration-form, the transformational-form, the geometry of encounter, and to argue for physical form as an in-movement poise. Advocating new modes of approach and of attentiveness, and demonstrating new generative methods, this PhD argues that process thinking is not simply an operational stance, but an ethical position that identifies a field of care, and that consequently the design practices be expanded by taking seriously the relationship between process thinking and place making. Thus, this thesis concludes by advocating a mode of place making which, rather than reproduce planned environments as systems of control, configures place as the discursive contested place of encounter and exchange. (shrink)

The 65th year of a scholar who has devoted 40 years to editing and elucidating Robert Grosseteste provides us with a collection of essays. Not surprisingly, they emanate from colleagues and former students of Richard Dales and reflect his interest, among other concerns, in Grosseteste's aspectus et affectus - range of vision and disposition of mind - those twin peaks with which the 13th century thinker helped to get Christian thought through Aristotle without mutual destruction.

Why did the scientific revolution take place in the West and not in China or the Islamic world? How did humanity's progress in science and technology, which had been moving along at a relatively steady pace for tens of thousands of years, end up taking such an unprecedented leap? Subjecting the history of thought and technology to a novel interpretation based on the relationship between theory and practice, Ahmet Selami Çalışkan argues that the industrial revolution and modern science-and the scientific (...) revolution that preceded both-did not alone suffice to sort out the philosophical problems of their day or to produce the institutions of the modern age. Both required a new sort of human: Homo economicus faber. Tracing the historical emergence of this figure and its persistence in our own age, this book offers an innovative and holistic assessment of the economic, cultural, and political effects of centuries of interaction between East and West and their repercussions in our world today. (shrink)

This is the collection of the FIRST Congress of the Italian Society for Analytic Philosophy. It is a piece of intellectual history, where we can see European Analytic Philosophers at the beginning of their renovated interest in analytic philosophy (European Society for Analytic Philosophy was founded in 1992) .