H.B.G. Casimir's life, interests and works are intertwined with the important developments that have taken place in physics during this century. This book was compiled by his friends and admirers in honour of his 80th birthday and concentrates mainly on Casimir's achievements in the field of physics, though without ignoring the peripheral areas of the history and philosophy of physics in which he was greatly interested. The book is divided into four parts. Part I describes Casimir's teachers, Ehrenfest, Bohr and (...) Pauli, and will be of general interest due to the key role which these physicists played in modern developments. The articles do give new facts and provide new insights into the history of modern physics. Part II consists of essays on recent developments in various areas of physics in which Casimir has taken an active interest, such as the modern concept of time, statistical foundations of electrodynamic theory and field theory. The subjects covered in Part III have been selected because of Casimir's efforts in the industrial research area of physics. They cover past, present and future expectations in research. (shrink)

An outline of the life of Heraclides and his fragmentary writings (on the theory of matter, astronomy, ethical and religious topics) is followed by an attempt to reconstruct his thought. He emerges as not so much a profound thinker as a many-sided writer of considerable literary gifts and occasional flashes of brilliance.

This account of poverty and deviance during recent times in the city of Antwerp compares situations of the 1930's with present times. Undoubtedly social security prevented, since the end of the war, that many people feit into poverty. Still in the presence of massive unemployment, public relieve organisations, such as the 0.C.M.W. are more and more confronted with what is called precarity.About 25% of the Antwerp population is estimated to be living in a precair situation. After glancing on the near (...) future and warningfor a number of social challenges, the article insists very much on preventional politics and coordinated total development projects in the depressed areas. (shrink)

It is not easy for an Englishman to acquire a competent knowledge of French philosophy. For one thing there are so many French philosophers writing so many books, and for another the multiplicity of men is matched by the variety of views. In a country where a knowledge of philosophy is expected of any cultivated man, and where the flourishing of philosophy in school and university curricula is regarded as a condition of intellectual freedom, this variety is accepted as part (...) of the cultural background. Professor Bréhier's Transformation de la Philosophie Française must, even so, be of great value to French readers, because of the author's capacity-so admirably shown already in a History of Philosophy that is unquestionably the best now obtainable-to pick out what is essential in a welter of theories, arguments, and mere pronouncements. To English readers, whose knowledge of the background is necessarily limited, this book is particularly valuable, not only for the clarification it brings, but also for a bibliography that is closely related to the text. M. Bréhier observes that French philosophers of the generation that followed and criticized Durkheim, Bergson and Brunschwicg showed themselves acutely conscious of the discontinuities of things, and puritanically averse to the construction of philosophical systems. M. Bréhier, however, does not take this anti-systematic, pluralist tendency at its own valuation. French philosophy, he thinks, is in a phase that makes it comparable to medieval philosophy. It was characteristic of medieval philosophy that it comprised no individually constructed systems like those, for example, of Descartes, Leibniz, Hegel, and Schopenhauer, which have grown up and died away in Europe since the Renaissance. The main reason for this was that Christianity itself provided a common system which was never to be questioned, so that philosophers concerned themselves not with systems, for that would have led to heresy, but with particular problems. Part of M. Bréhier's parallel with modern times is that some Christians and all Marxists aim to produce the same condition. (shrink)

The Peanese convention for the use of dots as brackets has the disadvantage that it gives only an awkward method for representing chains of indefinite length, such as the compound implicationSuch chains occur frequently in logical investigations of a metatheoretic nature, and it is convenient to have a systematic method of abbreviating them. The most obvious method of doing this would be to leave the parentheses out entirely, and to understand that in such cases the implication sign or other operation (...) appearing on the extreme left is the most inclusive; but this method, which has been followed by Quine, is at variance with our ordinary algebraic usage, in which we write a − b + c − d for ((a − b) + c) − d, and consequently leads to confusion. It is desirable to have a modification of the Peanese convention which gives a simple method of representing such chain implications, and at the same time avoids this difficulty.Such a modification is easily obtained by generalizing somewhat a procedure of Church. The latter author uses only a single dot, which he writes on the right of an operator to signify a bracket extending from that point to the end of the formula (or parenthesized expression). If dots are used only on the right of operations this is all that can be desired. But the essential idea of this device can be extended to the case where dots are used also on the left, as follows: let us suppose that a group of dots on the right of an operation or prefix denotes the beginning of a bracket which extends to the right until it meets a group with an equal or larger number of dots on the left of an operation; and that the scope of a group of dots on the left of an operation shall extend to the left until it reaches a larger group of dots on the right of some operation. (shrink)