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)

It is argued that dispositional explanations are radically incomplete causal explanations that are employed when (1) a description of the stimuli is insufficient to account for the object's response and (2) not enough is known about the object to specify what its specific causal contribution is. ryle's failure to refer to the causal contribution of the organism in his account of dispositions is regarded as a serious weakness.

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)

(1997). The fly in the ointment: A study of relativism in MacIntyre and Goodman as applied to innocence and guilt in Kafka's the trial. The European Legacy: Vol. 2, Fourth International Conference of the International Society for the Study of European Ideas, pp. 609-614.

Beginning with a review the logically first stages in the project of Random Dynamics, hoping for all laws nature being emergent, we also review what can be considered a consequence of Random Dynamics, a model—by myself and Masao Ninomiya—, which in principle predicts the initial conditions in such a way as to minimize a certain functional of the history of the Universe through both past and future. This functional is indeed the imaginary part of the action, which exists (only) in (...) our model of complex action. The main point of the present is to suggest this complex action model to be also helpfull in solving some problems for quantum mechanics. Especially as our model almost makes it possible in principle to calculate the full history of the universe, it even makes it in principle calculable, which one among several measurement results in a quantum experiment will actually be realized!Our “complex action model” thus is a special case of superdeterminism—in Bells way—and does not have true causality, but rather even in some cases true backward causation. In fact we claim in our model that the SSC(Superconducting Supercollider) were stopped by the US Congress due to the backward causation from the big amounts of Higgs particles, which it would have produced, if it had been allowed to run. The noumenon (“das Ding an sich”) in our model is the Feyman path integrand or better some fundamental quantities determined from second order effects of the latter integrand. The quantum mechanics interpretation here is strongly similar to the much criticized “transactional interpretation” by John Cramer (Rev. Mod. Phys. 58:647–688, 1986), but we might respond to some of the criticism. (shrink)