This book is both suitable for logically and algebraically minded graduate and advanced graduate students of mathematics, computer science and philosophy, and ...

Disability studies and special educational needs studies are becoming more and more popular nowadays as researcher got more evidence about both needs and potential of persons with disabilities. Investigating new possibilities and way of normalisations should be definitely based on stable anthropological principle as only then one can be sure that persons with disabilities are treated with brotherhood, dignity and respect, not as object of therapy, rehabilitation and medical procedures, but fully human subjects at every stage of their life. The (...) aim of the paper is to draw fundaments of Christian special education as a perspective that may form a basis for both research and counselling and rehabilitation practice. This perspective founded on principles of Christianity enriched with writings on disability of such persons as John Paul II and Jean Vanier is a guarantee of full development of persons with disabilities and/or special needs. (shrink)

The focus of this paper is the relationship between the Greek and Indian systems of physiognomics in antiquity. The study seeks to find similarities between the two geographically separated modes of thought and, as a result, to posit a plausible exchange of ideas about the human body as omen in antiquity, in which the flow of ideas went both ways between the Greek and Indian cultures in the ancient world.

Any finite support iteration of posets with precalibre ℵ 1 which has the length of cofinality greater than ω 1 yields a model for the dual Borel conjecture in which the real line is covered by ℵ 1 strong measure zero sets.

This book makes a significant contribution to the standard decision theory, that is, the theory of choice built around the principle of maximizing expected utility, both to its causal version and to the more traditional noncausal approach. The author’s success in clarifying the foundations of the standard decision theory in general, and causal decision theory in particular, also makes the book uniquely suitable for a person whose research in philosophy has led her to want to learn about contemporary decision theory. (...) The book presupposes some mathematical sophistication, and it contains more philosophical and mathematical argumentation per page than may be suitable for an undergraduate level course; but it stands out as an ideal textbook for a graduate-level course focused on the foundations of the standard decision theory. (shrink)

We propose a new schema for the deduction theorem and prove that the deductive system S of a prepositional logic L fulfills the proposed schema if and only if there exists a finite set A(p, q) of propositional formulae involving only prepositional letters p and q such that A(p, p) L and p, A(p, q) s q.

One can speak about mathematics too simplistically. On the one hand, school programs are such examples. On the other hand, the function of mathematics in elementary physics very much indicates the profound philosophical significance of mathematics: the author claims that mathematical language is a kind of command language, i.e. it is not just a description, but a control which has a specific power to manage the reality. This language has its proper hierarchy and structures which humans only are just starting (...) to understand and to use in basic ways, not without errors. Therefore some ethics regarding human mathematical thinking are needed: the affirmation of life. (shrink)

The paper is conceived as a first study on the Suszko operator. The purpose of this paper is to indicate the existence of close relations holding between the properties of the Suszko operator and the structural properties of the model class for various sentential logics. The emphasis is put on generality both of the results and methods of tackling the problems that arise in the theory of this operator. The attempt is made here to develop the theory for non-protoalgebraic logics.

We prove that if f is a partial Borel function from one Polish space to another, then either f can be decomposed into countably many partial continuous functions, or else f contains the countable infinite power of a bijection that maps a convergent sequence together with its limit onto a discrete space. This is a generalization of a dichotomy discovered by Solecki for Baire class 1 functions. As an application, we provide a characterization of functions which are countable unions of (...) continuous functions with domains of type Πn0, for a fixed n<ω. For Baire class 1 functions, this generalizes analogous characterizations proved by Jayne and Rogers for n=1 and Semmes for n=2. (shrink)

We are facing a crisis of trust in expertise today. Fewer and fewer people trust experts, and more and more politicians openly ignore expert consensus. 'Democracy in the Post-Truth Era' asks what might happen to democracy if we reject the fundamental liberal assumption that people are capable of making informed choices. The book explores the potential impact on society if people, including politicians, never appreciate the relevance of expert opinions. What if people cannot choose between supporters and opponents of key (...) issues such as the causes of climate change, effectiveness of vaccines and ways of combating economic and social crises? Applying social epistemology to these questions, the book considers whether democracy can be defended in the post-truth era. (shrink)

This study investigates performance of portfolios composed of British socially responsible investments (SRI) stocks. Using the ‘Global-100 Most Sustainable Corporations in the World’ list (known also as ‘Global-100’) to select the SRI companies, we found that, in the period 2000–2010, the returns of the SRI portfolios were on average higher compared with the corresponding returns of the market indexes. The annual average difference in returns of the SRI portfolios (with dividends) was 5.26 % and 5.69 % relative to the FTSE100 (...) and FTSE4GOOD indexes (the total return versions), respectively, but the differences in returns in the whole period, in individual years and in other sub-periods were in most cases not statistically significant. Positive performance of SRI stocks in the whole sample is, however, evidenced by risk-adjusted measures such as the modified Sharpe ratio (MSR) and certainty equivalent (CEQ) returns, as well as by incorporating various levels of transaction costs. Furthermore, a simple trading strategy relying on selection of SRI stocks from the Global-100 list would beat the market indexes in the whole period 2000–2010, even after inclusion of various levels of transaction costs. We also estimated the Fama–French and Carhart multi-factor models and found that the returns of the SRI portfolios cannot be consistently explained by conventional factors other than the market factor. (shrink)

In the domain of astronomy the object oriented paradigm of informatics needs to construct an ontology to be able to reason about concepts and to construct queries in a computerized knowledge system. The article presents approaches to ontology in philosophy, the natural sciences and informatics and shows their limits and reciprocity.

There is no direct, constant relationship between the anthropological and cultural aspects of modernity. Anthropologically modern peoples display a certain heterogeneity that is not unconnected with earlier peoples, and the culture produced by modern humans, which is also heterogeneous, is differentiated diachronically and according to territory. Though paleogenetic research seems to point us to a single, African source for modern peoples, who had replaced the pre-sapiens populations in Eurasia, this view is not completely proven or accepted. On the other hand, (...) paleo-genetic research has contributed to our relinquishing the hypothesis of a multiregional ‘total continuity’ of local pre-modern populations in the Old World. Indeed the theory of a partial replacement, by a migration ‘out of Africa’, appears to be getting increasingly plausible. This article deals with the problems of the origins of modern man from the points of view of anthropological, paleogenetic, paleoenvironmental and cultural approaches. (shrink)

This volume explores the range of Alfred North Whitehead's philosophy and his relevance to contemporary philosophical traditions.

An explanation is given of why, after adding to a model M of ZFC first a Solovay real r and next a Cohen real c, in M[ r][ c] a Cohen real over M[ c] is produced. It is also shown that a Solovay algebra iterated with a Cohen algebra can be embedded into a Cohen algebra iterated with a Solovay algebra.

The Absolute is a basic and fundamental issue for philosophy as such. I present different concepts of the Absolute (substantialism, energetism, escapism, methodologism). We can say that contemporary European philosophy “orphaned” the neo-Platonic tradition. Thereafter Russian philosophy developed in an intensive and turbulent as well as relatively uniform fashion, in view of the well-established Neo-Platonist context. This makes Russian philosophy not only part of a lasting universally acknowledged tradition; not only has Russian philosophy continued to develop currents of thought abandoned (...) by modern European philosophiers, but it is also heir to a philosophical tradition of particular quality and value in the universal history of thought. (shrink)

In the paper we study the class of weakly algebraizable logics, characterized by the monotonicity and injectivity of the Leibniz operator on the theories of the logic. This class forms a new level in the non-linear hierarchy of protoalgebraic logics.