In the famous Correspondence with Clarke, which took place during the last year of Leibniz's life, Leibniz advanced several arguments purporting to refute the absolute theory of space and time that was held by Newton and his followers. The main aim of this book is to reassess Leibniz's attack on the Newtonian theory in so far as he relied on the principle of the identity of indiscernibles. The theological side of the controversy is not ignored but isolated and discussed in (...) the last three chapters, which deal with problems connected with the notions of omnipotence and omniscience. (shrink)

This case study examines five dimensions of the 2007–2009 financial crisis in the United States: the devastating effects of the financial crisis on the U.S. economy, including unparalleled unemployment, massive declines in gross domestic product, and the prolonged mortgage foreclosure crisis; the multiple causes of the financial crisis and panic, such as the housing and bond bubbles, excessive leverage, lax financial regulation, disgraceful banking practices, and abysmal rating agency performance; the extraordinary efforts of the Federal Reserve, the Federal Reserve Bank (...) of New York, and the Department of the Treasury to stem the financial freefall triggered by the crisis and resuscitate financial institutions, the ethical implications of the unprecedented actions by government institutions to rescue financial institutions and drag the country back from the brink of global financial collapse, and the conduct of the various parties contributing to the financial crisis, such as the shoddy behavior of mortgage brokers, the massive securitization of mortgages into overly complex bonds, the excessive leverage of financial institutions, the disgraceful work of bond rating firms, the abysmal risk management systems employed by financial institutions, and the massive operations of the shadow banking and over-the-counter derivatives markets; and the major provisions of the Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act signed into law to in response to the financial crisis and for the purpose of correcting the egregious conduct of major financial institutions. (shrink)

Drawing on rare sources, many of which have not previously been translated into English, the view of Piaget and his work that emerges in this book is very different from the atheistic view of Piaget that is commonly held in psychology and transpersonal psychology. In both his early and later career Piaget held to an evolutionary view of spirituality reminiscent of the work of Hegel and Bergson. The spiritual future could be precursed by the individual in this life through the (...) experience of "Immanence."Piaget underwent a spiritual emergency in adolescence, reported in early autobiographical writing, in which he encountered an array of experiences described in Eastern and Western mystical cannons. For reasons discussed in this book, Piaget attempted to conceal his spiritual inclinations while tacitly confirming them in informal exchanges. This book not only describes the spiritual aspects of Piaget's life and work, it also builds bridges to both the contemporary transpersonal project and to contemporary psychology, by extending Piaget's own ideas to shed new light on transpersonal psychology and transpersonal philosophy, and on the future orientation of general psychology. The book validates the transpersonal project by showing its concerns to be germane to psychology's most influential figure. The reader will learn as much about the history, present, and future of transpersonal thought as they do about Piaget. (shrink)

In Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals, Inc., the U.S. Supreme Court made its first major pronouncement on the evaluation of scientific evidence, calling on judges to act as gatekeepers for scientific knowledge and validity, despite lack of scientific training among judges. Daubert offers the science studies community a case study for examining how judges engage in boundary-work and construct scientific validity. In constructing scientific validity under Daubert, judges must evaluate the scientific method behind a particular scientific claim, and will look (...) to the parties' experts and the relevant scientific community for assistance. To combat the oft-cited problem of the battle of the experts, judges may be tempted to obtain assistance from court-appointed neutral experts, an inquisitorial system in the civil law tradition of many European countries. The judicial evaluation of scientific evidence, the resulting construction of scientific validity, and the push for a greater use of court-appointed experts reveal judges' desire to segregate "objective" scientific facts from aspects of the legal process that are infused with adversaries' values. Yet the scientific and judicial construction of validity mixes empirical results and research methods with the personal, political, and institutional values of judges and scientists. (shrink)

In mid-Victorian Britain, reconciling elite mathematical expertise with practical mechanical experience presented both engineering and social challenges. Nowhere was this more apparent than in the construction of the Westminster Clock at Britain’s Houses of Parliament. Realizing this scheme engendered the collaboration between Cambridge mathematicians George Biddell Airy and Edmund Beckett Denison, and the clockmaker Edward John Dent. Transforming theoretical mathematical drawings into physical apparatus challenged existing relations between conveyors of privileged scientific knowledge and those with practical experience of what (...) was, and what was not, mechanically possible. My article demonstrates how, within this project, physical models and devices provided material solutions to ambiguities over authority and social disorder in Victorian Britain. (shrink)

For the last century, economic analysis has been wedded to the idea of equilibrium, in spite of the evident fact that most economic relationships are in flux. The theory of transformational growth in this work replaces equilibrium with history. The role of the market is not to allocate resources, but to generate innovations, which are 'selected' by competition in an evolutionary process. These innovations in turn change the way markets work and how they adjust, thus creating new problems and new (...) kinds of pressures to innovate. Different historical periods can be distinguished with a new one perhaps on the horizon. In each a distinctive style of technology prevails, associated with corresponding institutions and patterns of market behavior. The core relationships provide the foundations for a theory of monetary circulation, which makes possible a revised Keynesian approach, based on Classical foundations. (shrink)

Britain's nineteenth-century railway companies traditionally play a central role in histories of the spread of standard Greenwich time. This relationship at once seems to embody a productive relationship between science and capitalism, with regulated time essential to the formation of a disciplined industrial economy. In this narrative, it is not the state, but capitalistic private commerce which fashioned a national time system. However, as this article demonstrates, the collaboration between railway companies and the Royal Greenwich Observatory was far from harmonious. (...) While railways did employ the accurate time the observatory provided, they were also more than happy to compromise the astronomical institution's ability to take the accurate celestial observations that such time depended on. Observing astronomical transits required the use of troughs of mercury to reflect images of stars, but the construction of a railway too near to the observatory threatened to cause vibrations which would make such readings impossible. Through debates over proposed railway lines near the observatory, it becomes clear how important government protection from private interests was to preserving astronomical standards. This article revises our understanding of the role of railway companies in the dissemination of standard time and argues that state intervention was essential to preserving Victorian British astronomical science. (shrink)

Studies based on the Rankine-Hugoniot relations have classified MHO shock waves as fast, switch-on, intermediate, switch-off, and slow. Any waves found in nature must also: possess steady-state structures and be stable in the presence of small-flow disturbances. In this monograph, Dr. Anderson examines these criteria in relation to plane shocks for which the collision frequency is large compared with cyclotron frequency. It contains a three-dimensional graphic representation of shock end states and presents an exact solution for the shock adiabatic curve (...) in a convenient form. An MIT Press Research Monograph. (shrink)

ABSTRACT:Officials must understand why and how the public lost confidence in the federal government’s ability to manage financial turmoil. Officials outsourced to private parties responsibility for monitoring and policing the safety-net exposures that were bound to be generated by weaknesses in the securitization process. When the adverse consequences of this imprudent arrangement first emerged, officials claimed for months that the difficulties that short-funded, highly leveraged firms were facing in rolling over debt reflected only a shortage of aggregate liquidity and not (...) individual-firm shortages of economic capital. Then, in September 2008, the president and other officials created an unwise sense of urgency that delays in implementation show to have been greatly exaggerated.That authorities and financiers violated common-law duties of loyalty, competence, and care they owe to taxpayers indicates a massive incentive breakdown in industry and government. Taxpayers deserve a thorough-going reorientation of: (1) how regulatory agencies report on their regulatory performance and back-room interactions with Congress and the Treasury, and (2) the contract structures and performance measures used by the financial industry and its government overseers. (shrink)

Although the Catholic philosophical tradition speaks of the generative faculty as one of the vital powers of the soul, this power is not described, in its own right, as either male or female. The generative faculty exists generically within the soul and only manifests as male or female in a given body. That is, the generative power may be male or female depending on the body in which the soul is infused. If we do not take this view, then we (...) must either assert that it is possible for God to infuse a sexed soul into the wrong body or hold that the body–soul union does not bring the individual substance into existence. The doctrinal teachings of the Church and the Catholic philosophical tradition would seem to bar any claim that the soul can be infused into the wrong body. (shrink)

In the late 1800s, Charles Darwin and other naturalists supported a blending view of inheritance whereby offspring possess a middling mix of their parents' traits. Many of these naturalists also argued that individuals pass at least some of their acquired characteristics to their descendants. Darwin proposed that acquired characteristics and other environmentally induced changes in a parent's hereditary material account in large part for the inheritable variations that drove evolution. Inspired by the evolutionary theories of his first cousin, Darwin, Francis (...) Galton developed hereditarian notions that helped to lay the foundation for both genetics and eugenics. Eugenics was endorsed by evolutionary geneticists such as August Weismann, Karl Pearson, W. F. R. Weldon, William Bateson, and Hugo de Vries, which, as a result, gave it enormous scientific credibility in America and Europe. This chapter explores the role of biology in the emergence of the eugenics movement in the Anglo-Saxon world. (shrink)