Originally published in Proceedings of the British Academy 60 (1974), 339-359.

Concerns about censorship have once again reached a fever pitch across the liberal West. In other historical periods, such concerns may have marked reactions to book bans and burnings. Often, they followed prosecutions and subsequent jailtime for things spoken or written. During the Red Scare, they were the hushed response to chilling state-sponsored watch-lists and employer-supported blacklists designed to ensure victory against communism. Against this history, complaints about the new censorship appear differently. With respect to the new censorship, there are (...) no books burnings, no prosecutions, no laws or committees. Indeed, there is no coercive state involvement at all. With a few notable exceptions, complaints about censorship in the 21st-century West are complaints about the behavior of private parties: social groups, employers, media conglomerates, social media platforms, and search engines. -/- To better understand the concerns surrounding nonstate interference with speech, Private Censorship offers an account of censorship, as well as an assessment of the ethical and political issues it raises across contexts. J.P. Messina asks and variously answers questions like: what should we think when employees get fired for things they say and how might patterns of such firings create a climate of fear inimical to free inquiry? When is it appropriate for social media firms to deplatform users, and what does it mean for our democracy that those in charge of such decisions are often wealthy Silicon Valley executives? Do search engines act as massive gatekeepers to information in troubling ways, and how might they be constrained, if they do? Along the way, Messina casts a critical eye on many popular proposals for responding to these complaints. Unlike these popular approaches, Private Censorship foregrounds the importance of rights to property, association, and free expression for thinking well about 21st-century censorship concerns. (shrink)

J. L. Ackrill's work on Plato and Aristotle has had a considerable influence upon ancient philosophical studies in the late twentieth century. In his writings the rigour and clarity of contemporary analytic philosophy are brought to bear upon ancient thought; in many cases he has provided thefirst analytic treatment of a key issue. Gathered now in this volume are the best of Ackrill's essays on the two greatest philosophers of antiquity. With philosophical acuity and philological expertise he examines a wide (...) range of texts and topics--from ethics and logic to epistemology andmetaphysics--which continue to be in the focus of debate. (shrink)

Measurement realism, the view that measurement targets quantitative attributes and that not all attributes are quantitative, has come under attack both from metrologists and philosophers. In this paper, I take a close look at two influential arguments against measurement realism: the argument from obsolescence and the argument from coordination. I concede that these arguments do challenge the epistemological position traditionally taken by measurement realists, but argue that the metaphysical core of measurement realism survives the challenge posed by these arguments. This (...) metaphysical core is vital to maintaining a clear and ambitious standard for successful measurement. (shrink)

The author wishes to add the following correction to his paper published in Philosophies [1]:The repeated fragment from lines 13–18 and part of 19 on page 69 should be deleted [...].

J.W. Olson addresses the Christian doctrine of revelation by asking how theological truth claims can possibly be rooted in God’s incarnational self-communication. Engaging with the phenomenology of Martin Heidegger, Olson offers an interpretation of the Eucharist that grounds Christian knowledge in an embodied understanding of the sacrament.

Álvarez J.F. (2016) Conflicts, Bounded Rationality and Collective Wisdom in a Networked Society. In: Scarafile G., Gruenpeter Gold L. (eds) Paradoxes of Conflicts. Logic, Argumentation & Reasoning (Interdisciplinary Perspectives from the Humanities and Social Sciences), vol 12. Springer, Cham -/- The adoption of an individualistic perspective on reasoning, choice and decision is a spring of paradoxes of conflicts. Usually the agents immerse in conflicts are drawn or modelled as rational individuals with targets well defined and full capabilities to access to (...) information, without both temporal limitations and perfect reasoning abilities to obtain their preferences are taken account. -/- However, other models of agent, in the bounded rationality perspective, could help to understand better the interrelationships. I adopt embedded argumentative reasoning processes as satisfying criteria to analyze the expert function in a new socio technical environment that has changed deeply the mechanism and tools to access and to aggregate information. The open access to information and institutional arrangements addressed towards team knowledge could offer other kind of tools to affront the conflict, even its possible benefits. -/- The “crowd expertise” is emerging as an actual possibility and it must be incorporated to affront with conflicts. The very possibility of obtaining knowledge generated by “many minds”, collective wisdoms, brings up a real challenge to the conservative or elitist conception of the masses, because masses now emerge as a smart collective user, with new mechanisms to select and produce quality knowledge. These new collective actions differ deeply from the traditional modes of social organization. A new mass society is emerging now as a hybrid one that breaks some conceptual traditional models, such as Ortega y Gasset’s ones, and induces a structured way of flourishing both new practices and new knowledge with transforming capabilities. (shrink)

Las reflexiones recogidas en este volumen constituyeron, en su mayor parte, el contenido del Seminario de Semántica celebrado en la Universidad de Oviedo, y uno de los textos ("Léxico y cognición: ¿hay términos de base?") formó parte del programa de conferencias de Año Europeo de las Lenguas. Conforme al espíritu de esas jornadas centradas en la pluralidad lingüística, esta publicación se hace simultáneamente en dos lenguas: español y francés. Aunque se tomen como referencia aspectos concretos de dos lenguas concretas, la (...) española y la francesa, los problemas que aquí se suscitan son de índole general, ya que afectan, y de manera crucial, a todas las lenguas. (shrink)

The connection with the quarks of the stochastic model proposed in the two preceding papers is studied; the slopes of the baryon trajectories are calculated with reference to the quarks. Suggestions are made for the interpretation of the model (quadratic or linear addition of the contributions to the mass, dependence of the decay on the quantum numbers of the hadrons involved, etc.) and concerning its link with the quarkonium model, which describes the mesons with charm or beauty. The controversial question (...) of the “subquantum level” is examined. (shrink)

When space-reflection and time-reversal symmetries are broken, the Thomas precession formulas derived by Thomas' method and from the BMT equation differ from each other. This apparent contradiction is resolved by pointing out that the breakdown of discrete symmetries may lead to a change in the operational meaning of the Lorentz-group elements.

In this paper, I explore how Cassirer’s early and mature epistemology, philosophy of science, and philosophy of culture make up a coherent and comprehensive view of the mathematical sciences that is fruitful for understanding contemporary science. In Cassirer’s first systematic work, Substanzbegriff und Funktionsbegriff, the mathematical sciences are understood through the concept of function. This implies that scientific investigation aims at increased unity in a system of functional concepts, rather than at answering the substance-rooted question of what is. In his (...) mature work, Philosophie der symbolischen Formen, Cassirer expands his inquiry to diverse notions of objects and principles of symbolic forming, recognizing the mathematical sciences as one of many ways of structuring experience, alongside other symbolic forms such as myth and ordinary language. Together, Cassirer’s early and mature works detail the preconditions and idiosyncrasies of the unfolding of scientific objects and situate the mathematical sciences within the totality of human experience. Applying these insights to contemporary interpretations of science suggests connecting common misconceptions of science to challenges in translating objects between symbolic forms. I propose the concepts of domestication and mythification of science as instructive for clearing up such misunderstandings. (shrink)

Zeno's paradoxes of motion are considered as challenges to the practice of describing motion in terms of continuous functions. A brief description of some work of adolf gruenbaum toward the resolution of these paradoxes is given. A new form of zeno's dichotomy paradox is described, And it is claimed that the paradox, In this form, Is not amenable to the explanations of gruenbaum. This is demonstrated by giving the new form of the paradox a second, More mathematical description. In a (...) short summary it is claimed that the challenges of zeno's paradoxes are still unanswered. (shrink)