(Statement of Responsibility) by C.A. Stephens ; illustrated.

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)

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.

Multiple different understandings and uses exist of what granularity is and how to implement it, where the former influences success of the latter with regards to storing granular data and using granularity for reasoning over the data or information. We propose a taxonomy of types of granularity and discuss for each leaf type how the entities or instances relate within its granular level. Such unambiguous distinctions can guide a conceptual modeler to better distinguish between the types of granularity and the (...) software developer to improve on implementations of granularity. (shrink)

The thesis of this book is to develop a theory of value covering all kinds of values, based on my unified utilitarian theory. It is unique and is different from all traditional and existing theories of value. Like the views of most psychologists and decision-scientists, value is asserted to be subjective in nature because value exists only for a subject. Value and value judgment are considered statistical in nature in three dimensions, namely in the dimensions of subject, object, and judge. (...) This theory covers a modified von Neumann-Morgenstern utility theory as an integral part. The three conceptions of utility held by philosophers, economicsts, and decision-scientists are unified. The traditional and conventional classification of value into intrinsic and instrumental, which may lead to confusion, misunderstanding, and circularity, is not used. Instead, a classification based on the classification of good things in life according to the principle of exchangeability and replaceability is emphasized and used. A decision-theoretic approach is taken for the study of actions in life. All the actions in a person's life are for the pursuit of values, and all the values pursued are related, directly or indirectly, closely or remotely, to a life plan. Thus, this utilitarian general theory of value eventually leads to a philosophy of life, which is also consequential, teleological, and utilitarian. (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) .