This paper addresses the issue of how science and history of science may help or be helped by Vedic studies. The conclusions drawn are that: 1. Vedic studies are important for the history of Indian science; 2. Modern science, in particular physics, is not a useful source of philosophical ideas that confirm aspects of Vedic studies; 3. Vedic studies will not contribute to modern scientific research; and 4. Vedic studies are nevertheless centrally important for an understanding of Indian history and (...) culture in general. (shrink)

I discuss issues concerning the philosophical foundations andimplications of quantum field theory, renormalization inparticular. A new understanding of the correspondence principle,an unexpected role of perturbation theory and, most of all, acriterion to reduce the set of consistent theories frominfinitely many to finitely many, are the key concepts of atheoretical set-up that appears to overcome in a natural wayvarious consistency problems of quantum mechanics and offerseveral hints for further developments.

Health care workers with needlestick exposures to patients' blood often request a test of the patient for evidence of infection with human immunodeficiency virus. If the patient refuses the test, a conflict develops between the interests of the health care worker and those of the patient. Traditional approaches to this dilemma attempt to balance the rights or utilities of abstract patients and health care workers. While these approaches have the advantage of offering clear guidelines in advance of conflict, the interests (...) of the actual participants may differ from those used to create the guidelines. In nonmedical settings, conflicts are often resolved efficiently through negotiation and monetary exchanges. Although negotiated monetary settlements between health care workers and patients may be an impractical way to resolve medical conflicts, models developed from these perspectives provide insights into the individual interests of physicians and patients. Changing existing rules about medical record documentation, or increasing the penalties for the misuse of medical information, may satisfy the interests on both sides of the conflict and so represent integrative bargaining solutions. Even so, as the relationship between health care workers and their patients evolves, more explicit strategies for negotiation may become a reasonable solution to the problem of conflict. (shrink)

In a previous paper we have shown that in quantum chromodynamics the gluon propagator vanishes in the infrared limit, while the ghost propagator is more singular than a simple pole. These results were obtained after angular averaging, but in the current paper we go beyond this approximation and perform an exact calculation of the angular integrals. The powers of the infrared behaviour of the propagators are changed substantially. We find the very intriguing result that the gluon propagator vanishes in the (...) infrared exactly like p2, whilst the ghost propagator is exactly as singular as 1/p4. We also find that the value of the infrared fixed point of the QCD coupling is much decreased from the y-max estimate: it is now equal to 4π/3. Following a recent study by von Smekal et al.[1], we analyzed in Ref.[2] the coupled Dyson- Schwinger equations for the gluon and ghost form factors F and G. The approximations were two-fold: firstly the vertices were taken bare, and secondly angular averaging was introduced (the so-called y-max approximation). Deferring to later work an improvement of the vertices. (shrink)

quantum electrodynamics. In quasilinear approximation, the integral equation is solved by Mellin transformation, followed by the calculation of the Muskhelishvili index of the resultant singular integral operator.

F. H. Bradley: Logic Although the logical system expounded by F. H. Bradley in The Principles of Logic is now almost forgotten, it had many virtues. To appreciate them, it is helpful to understand that Bradley had a very different view of logic from that prevalent today. He is hostile to the idea of … Continue reading Bradley, F. H.: Logic →.

Can there be a non-reductivist, source-based explanation of the use of normative language in statements describing the law and legal situations? This problem was formulated by Joseph Raz, who also claimed to have solved it. According to his well-known doctrine of ‘detached’ statements, normative legal statements can be informatively made by speakers who merely adopt, without necessarily sharing, the point of view of someone who accepts that legal norms are justified and ought to be followed. In this paper I defend (...) two theses. I argue, first, that the notion of a detached statement cannot be made to work, and that Raz’s problem is thus not thereby solved. But the problem itself, I also suggest, is a false one. (shrink)

Introduction: becoming a philosopher -- Traveling South -- A stateless man's passport -- Night train through Mont Cenis -- The camels of Pisa -- Naples: first revelation of the South -- "The school of educators" at the Villa Rubinacci -- Richard Wagner in Sorrento -- The monastery of free spirits -- Dreaming of the dead -- Walks on the land of the sirens -- The carnival of Naples -- Mithras at Capri -- Sorrentiner papiere -- Rée-alism and the chemical combinations (...) of atoms -- The logic of dreams -- An epicurean in Sorrento -- Sacred music on an African background -- The sun of knowledge and the ground of things -- The blessed isles -- The bells of Genoa and Nietzschean epiphanies -- Epiphanies -- The value of human things -- Crossed geneses -- The azure bell of innocence -- Zarathustra's night song -- Epilogue to the bell -- Torna a Surriento. (shrink)

D. Barton Johnson traces the parallel lives and literary origins of two Russo-American writers: Ayn Rand and Vladimir Nabokov. Born in Saint Peterburg six years apart, they overlapped on the New York Times bestsellers list in the late fifties. While Nabokov's Russian cultural roots have been much explored, Rand's were little realized prior to Chris Matthew Sciabarra's investigation of her Russian philosophical context. Nabokov and Rand represent polar examples of their cultural heritage: for Nabokov, the aesthetically-oriented tradition of the modernist (...) Russian Symbolists; for Rand, the social-utilitarian tradition of Nikolai Chernyshevsky, and later, Maxim Gorky, founder of Socialist Realism. (shrink)

In his 'The Disorder of Things' John Dupré presents an objection to reductionism which I call the 'anti-essentialist objection': it is that reductionism requires essentialism, and essentialism is false. I unpack the objection and assess its cogency. Once the objection is clearly in view, it is likely to appeal to those who think conceptual analysis a bankrupt project. I offer on behalf of the reductionist two strategies for responding, one which seeks to rehabilitate conceptual analysis and one (more concessive) which (...) avoids commitment to any such analysis. (shrink)

A close examination of Kim's argument in "Multiple Realization and the Metaphysics of Reduction" for the claim that if a kind is multiply realizable in a way that blocks identification with more fundamental properties it is also a kind unlikely to appear as an appropriate kind in a theory in the first place. Ultimately, I argue that there is one reasonably promising argument of this sort, but its success turns on explanatory questions the answers to which are far from obvious.

This translation of selections from the De universo grew out of a graduate seminar on William of Auvergne held at Marquette University in 1995. It translates and annotates large parts of the De universo and of the De anima.

Euro Women's Independent Label Distribution (WILD) was a pan-European network of feminist music distributors active in the early 1980s. They were affiliated to WILD, the US-based Women's Music distribution network founded in 1979 to disseminate the growing corpus of Women's Music emerging from the US Women's Liberation Movement (WLM). This article presents an interpretation of archive materials that document Euro WILD's activities from the Women's Revolutions Per Minute archive, housed at the Women's Art Library, London. Constrained and enabled by the (...) archive materials on offer, I revisit some of the practical and political problems the network faced as European distributors of US Women's Music. Key issues explored include the perception of US cultural imperialism by women based in Europe and the affective politics that circulated transnationally between distributors. Finally, this article explores how the concept and practice of the Women's Music industry changed when women beyond the borders of the US engaged with it. (shrink)

The women’s liberation movements that emerged in Britain in the late 1960s are rarely thought of through their relationship with technology and technical knowledge. To overlook this is to misunderstand the movement’s social, cultural and economic interventions; it also understates how the technical environment conditioned the emergence of autonomous, women-centred politics. This article draws on archival evidence to demonstrate how the autonomous women’s liberation movement created experimental social contexts that enabled de-skilled, feminised social classes to confront their technical environment and (...) the deficits they experienced within it. The context for forging such politics was the workshop. More than a one-off, skill-sharing event, the workshop was a mobile habitus, adapted from a Marxist craft politics that prioritised the distribution of collective knowledge and responsibility and enabled the realisation of women's self-determination and autonomy. The workshop was discursively extended through women-authored publications in the 1970s and 1980s and designated a specific orientation within knowledge that supported women to practise a range of technical knowledge and gain expertise. An important, and largely forgotten political legacy of women's liberation is its world-making activisms: how it created social contexts that supported de-skilled, feminised classes to substantially intervene, shape and re-build their environments. Such histories can inspire how we practise politics today within an environment characterised, some theorists claim, by dramatic scales of de-skilling and dispossession. (shrink)