Humean Supervenience is the view that (a) there are a plurality of fundamental beings, (b) there are no inexplicable constraints on modal space, and hence the fundamental nature of each such being is independent of those of all the rest and of the fundamental relations in which it stands to the rest, (c) the fundamental beings stand in no fundamental causal or nomic relations, and hence (d) the distribution of any causal or nomic relations in which they do stand globally (...) supervenes on their fundamental natures and the non‐nomic, non‐causal fundamental relations in which they stand. If Humean Supervenience is true, then as A.J. Ayer put it, it's just one damn thing after another. Radical Pluralism is the view that Humean Supervenience is true, and, moreover, that none of the fundamental beings stands in any fundamental relations at all. If Radical Pluralism is true, then, as William James puts it, the world's pieces are held together by nothing more than conjunction: it's just one damn thing and another. I argue that Radical Pluralism is very likely true, conditional upon Humean Supervenience. Any philosopher pluralist enough to be Humean ought to be radically pluralistic. (shrink)

In Portraits of American Philosophy, eight of America's most prominent philosophers offer autobiographical narratives that remind us that the life of a scholar is both a tale of personal struggle and an adventure in ideas.

We give a unified account of some results in the development of Polyadic Inductive Logic in the last decade with particular reference to the Principle of Spectrum Exchangeability, its consequences for Instantial Relevance, Language Invariance and Johnson's Sufficientness Principle, and the corresponding de Finetti style representation theorems.

Michael Allen's latest work on the profoundly influential Florentine thinker of the fifteenth century, Marsilio Ficino, will be welcomed by philosophers, literary scholars, and historians of the Renaissance, as well as by classicists. Ficino was responsible for inaugurating, shaping, and disseminating the wide-ranging philosophico-cultural movement known as Renaissance Platonism, and his views on the _Sophist_, which he saw as Plato's preeminent ontological dialogue, are of signal interest. This dialogue also served Ficino as a vehicle for exploring a number of other (...) humanist, philosophical, and magical preoccupations, including the theme of man the artist and creator. (shrink)

Fifteen of these essays by one of the leading authorities on Renaissance Platonism explore the complex philosophical, hermeneutical, and mythological issues addressed by the Florentine, Marsilio Ficino (1433-99). Ficino was the pre-eminent Platonist of his time and a distinguished philosopher, scholar and magus who had an enormous influence on the intellectual and cultural life of two and a half centuries, and who is one of the most important witnesses to the preoccupations of his age, above all to its fascination with (...) ancient poetry and philosophy and their uneasy accommodation as an ancient "theology" with Christianity. Two further essays treat of cognate themes taken up by Ficino's younger friend and rival, the dazzling prince of Concordia, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463-94), who was fascinated by Platonism in his youth but also by other philosophical legacies from the past, including Cabala and the Scholastic Aristotelianism of the Middle Ages. This volume's initial essay serves as an introduction to the comprehensive phenomenon of Renaissance Platonism. (shrink)

PREFACE. THE Author of this very practical treatise on Scotch Loch - Fishing desires clearly that it may be of use to all who had it. He does not pretend to have written anything new, but to have attempted to put what he has to say in as readable a form as possible. Everything in the way of the history and habits of fish has been studiously avoided, and technicalities have been used as sparingly as possible. The writing of this (...) book has afforded him pleasure in his leisure moments, and that pleasure would be much increased if he knew that the perusal of it would create any bond of sympathy between himself and the angling community in general. This section is interleaved with blank shects for the readers notes. The Author need hardly say that any suggestions addressed to the case of the publishers, will meet with consideration in a future edition. We do not pretend to write or enlarge upon a new subject. Much has been said and written-and well said and written too on the art of fishing but loch-fishing has been rather looked upon as a second-rate performance, and to dispel this idea is one of the objects for which this present treatise has been written. Far be it from us to say anything against fishing, lawfully practised in any form but many pent up in our large towns will bear us out when me say that, on the whole, a days loch-fishing is the most convenient. One great matter is, that the loch-fisher is depend- ent on nothing but enough wind to curl the water, -and on a large loch it is very seldom that a dead calm prevails all day, -and can make his arrangements for a day, weeks beforehand whereas the stream- fisher is dependent for a good take on the state of the water and however pleasant and easy it may be for one living near the banks of a good trout stream or river, it is quite another matter to arrange for a days river-fishing, if one is looking forward to a holiday at a date some weeks ahead. Providence may favour the expectant angler with a good day, and the water in order but experience has taught most of us that the good days are in the minority, and that, as is the case with our rapid running streams, -such as many of our northern streams are, -the water is either too large or too small, unless, as previously remarked, you live near at hand, and can catch it at its best. A common belief in regard to loch-fishing is, that the tyro and the experienced angler have nearly the same chance in fishing, -the one from the stern and the other from the bow of the same boat. Of all the absurd beliefs as to loch-fishing, this is one of the most absurd. Try it. Give the tyro either end of the boat he likes give him a cast of ally flies he may fancy, or even a cast similar to those which a crack may be using and if he catches one for every three the other has, he may consider himself very lucky. Of course there are lochs where the fish are not abundant, and a beginner may come across as many as an older fisher but we speak of lochs where there are fish to be caught, and where each has a fair chance. Again, it is said that the boatman has as much to do with catching trout in a loch as the angler. Well, we dont deny that. In an untried loch it is necessary to have the guidance of a good boatman but the same argument holds good as to stream-fishing... (shrink)

In [6], Metakides and Nerode introduced the study of the lattice of recursively enumerable substructures of a recursively presented model as a means to understand the recursive content of certain algebraic constructions. For example, the lattice of recursively enumerable subspaces,, of a recursively presented vector spaceV∞has been studied by Kalantari, Metakides and Nerode, Retzlaff, Remmel and Shore. Similar studies have been done by Remmel [12], [13] for Boolean algebras and by Metakides and Nerode [9] for algebraically closed fields. In all (...) of these models, the algebraic closure of a set is nontrivial., is given in §1, however in vector spaces, cl is just the subspace generated byS, in Boolean algebras, cl is just the subalgebra generated byS, and in algebraically closed fields, cl is just the algebraically closed subfield generated byS.)In this paper, we give a general model theoretic setting in which we are able to give constructions which generalize many of the constructions of classical recursion theory. One of the main features of the modelswhich we study is that the algebraic closure of setis just itself, i.e., cl = S. Examples of such models include the natural numbers under equality 〈N, = 〉, the rational numbers under the usual ordering 〈Q, ≤〉, and a large class ofn-dimensional partial orderings. (shrink)

We discuss the concepts of Weyl and Riemann frames in the context of metric theories of gravity and state the fact that they are completely equivalent as far as geodesic motion is concerned. We apply this result to conformally flat spacetimes and show that a new picture arises when a Riemannian spacetime is taken by means of geometrical gauge transformations into a Minkowskian flat spacetime. We find out that in the Weyl frame gravity is described by a scalar field. We (...) give some examples of how conformally flat spacetime configurations look when viewed from the standpoint of a Weyl frame. We show that in the non-relativistic and weak field regime the Weyl scalar field may be identified with the Newtonian gravitational potential. We suggest an equation for the scalar field by varying the Einstein-Hilbert action restricted to the class of conformally-flat spacetimes. We revisit Einstein and Fokker’s interpretation of Nordström scalar gravity theory and draw an analogy between this approach and the Weyl gauge formalism. We briefly take a look at two-dimensional gravity as viewed in the Weyl frame and address the question of quantizing a conformally flat spacetime by going to the Weyl frame. (shrink)

A recent publication1 describes a novel mechanism by which a morphogen gradient might be established. These results concern a gradient of FGF8 expression along the longitudinal axis of the chick embryo with a high level of transcripts at the tail, fading off in an anterior direction. Assaying for intron transcripts, it is shown that fgf8 is transcribed only in the tail cells and that the gradient of fgf8 transcripts is produced by growth and mRNA degradation. This possible mechanism of gradient (...) formation can operate only when growth is involved, as is the case in many examples including the longitudinal axis formation of vertebrates, but is not in some other systems. BioEssays 26:705–706, 2004. © 2004 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)