The Mathematical Intelligencer recently published a note by Y. Sergeyev that challenges both mathematics and intelligence. We examine Sergeyev’s claims concerning his purported Infinity computer. We compare his grossone system with the classical Levi-Civita fields and with the hyperreal framework of A. Robinson, and analyze the related algorithmic issues inevitably arising in any genuine computer implementation. We show that Sergeyev’s grossone system is unnecessary and vague, and that whatever consistent subsystem could be salvaged is subsumed entirely within a stronger and (...) clearer system. Lou Kauffman, who published an article on a grossone, places it squarely outside the historical panorama of ideas dealing with infinity and infinitesimals. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Rhetoric 35.3 (2002) 208-222 [Access article in PDF] Writing, Illness and Affirmation Jeremiah Dyehouse My formula for greatness in a human being is amor fati: that one wants nothing to be different, not forward, not backward, not in all eternity. Not merely to bear what is necessary, still less conceal it—all idealism is mendaciousness in the face of what is necessary—but love it. —Friedrich Nietzsche In (...) her widely circulated book On Death and Dying, Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, M.D., addresses herself to a changed historical context for work in medicine. In societies with increasingly effective medical care, she argues, doctors and nurses find themselves working with patients whose health problems range from imperceptible yet terminal sicknesses to psychosomatic ailments. Today, especially, it is easy to see the reality of her description of this situation: forms of terminal cancer can be detected earlier and earlier in a patient's life, rendering the disconcerting reality of a terminal illness with few or no symptoms. Equally strange for doctors and patients today are forms of environmental illness like chronic fatigue syndrome, a condition suffered by many but still disputed by doctors and researchers. To this situation of medical risk, personal suffering, and therapeutic care, Kübler-Ross prescribes a communicative engagement with the dying. This engagement, she argues, not only teaches doctors about death and dying, but it also provides respite for those who must experience these events.The problem of communicating with the dying, the main focus of Kübler-Ross's book, is nevertheless eclipsed by the other, more notable aspect of On Death and Dying. For out of this book emerged the now very popular understanding of the stages of death, the normal sequence of an individual's emotional reconciliation to dying: the processes of denial and isolation, anger, bargaining, depression—the whole series of intrapsychic processes leading up to a final acceptance of death and dying. Now we live amongst a whole panoply of staged progresses towards the acceptance of trauma: trauma associated not only with death and dying but also with substance abuse, catastrophe, and forms of violence. It is perhaps worth recalling, however, that the most famous of these stage models, the five stages [End Page 208] of death, emerged out of Kübler-Ross's attempt to learn what the dying can teach the living about communication.In what follows, I assume that writing about illness is another, more popular form of Kübler-Ross's descriptive and communicative project. To write pathography, as Anne Hunsaker Hawkins calls narratives of illness and dying in her survey of these texts, Reconstructing Illness: Studies in Pathography, is to engage with what sickness and dying teach about life and writing. As might be guessed, most pathographies orbit familiar centers of gravity: agency for the dying, reconciliation for the living, the whole leaden project of acceptance. Even so, pathography is not always and everywhere engaged in such projects. Pathography, as Hawkins demonstrates, is a highly variable project. Literary pathography is quite different from popular pathography, and texts within these categories differ with respect to the purpose of their writing. Pathography is conceived as a communicative engagement with sickness and dying, with the sick and the dying, but is hardly unified in its aims or its functions. It is a form of writing that not just potentially but actually admits a diversity of purposes and produces a variety of effects.It is my purpose here to propose a typology for pathographies. Although pathography as a genre of writing takes a bewildering variety of forms, these writings can be grouped according to their effects. I divide pathography into three types, according to the kind of response they offer to sickness and dying, to the sick and the dying. First, I treat pathography as a process of passive acceptance, the bearing of a burden proposed by the necessities of illness and death. Next, I characterize pathographies that approach the writing of illness or dying as a process of active acceptance. This type of pathography uses writing about illness and dying as a process for the... (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Kant-Studien Jahrgang: 106 Heft: 2 Seiten: 169-200.

Jc Beall’s off-topic interpretation of Weak Kleene logic offers a logic of ‘true-and-topic’ preservation. However, Nissim Francez has recently argued that being ‘off-topic’ is a relational and not an _absolute_ semantic property; as such, it fails to satisfy the conditions of truth-functionality. For Francez, this means that it ‘cannot serve as an interpretation of a truth-value’. In this paper, I propose a two-layered _re_interpretation of Beall’s off-topic semantics. This two-layered framework has two crucial features: a sentential topic-tagging device and a (...) two-layered evaluation tool. I show that this framework results in a logic that preserves Beall’s key insight and addresses Francez’s concerns. (shrink)

Theodore Sider’s puzzle in Hell and Vagueness has generated some interesting responses in the past few years. In this paper, I explore yet another possible solution out of the conundrum. This solution implies three ways of denying a binary conception of the afterlife. I argue that while these solutions might first seem tenable, they might still succumb to a Sideresque revenge puzzle.

The hit American TV show The Good Place has garnered quite a following in recent years. Its main premise implies a scorekeeping view of the afterlife. People who have collected enough credits in their earthly lives will make the cut and go to the Good Place, while those who do not will be banished to the Bad Place. We suggest that such a premise would have to come to terms with Ted Sider's puzzle about the compatibility of a binary afterlife (...) with God's divine attributes. (shrink)

In “Sideways Music”, Ned Markosian presents the aesthetic value variance of sideways music as a case against what the Spacetime Thesis—the thesis that time is one of four similar dimensions that make up spacetime. Critics have already raised worries about the premises of his argument. In this paper, I focus on Markosian’s assumed aesthetic realism. I argue that there is a version of aesthetic realism—a version that admits aesthetic value gluts—that is consistent with both the Spacetime Thesis and the aesthetic (...) variance of sideways music. If this is right, then sideways music may simply be a non-issue for proponents of the Spacetime Thesis. (shrink)

A Critical Edition of the Pseudo-Avicenna Liber Celi et Mundi , the twelfth century Latin translation of an Arabic paraphrase of Aristotle's De Caelo.

Jeremiah Alberg’s fascinating book explores a phenomenon almost every news reader has experienced: the curious tendency to skim over dispatches from war zones, political battlefields, and economic centers, only to be drawn in by headlines announcing a late-breaking scandal. Rationally we would agree that the former are of more significance and importance, but they do not pique our curiosity in quite the same way. The affective reaction to scandal is one both of interest and of embarrassment or anger at (...) the interest. The reader is at the same time attracted to and repulsed by it. _Beneath the Veil of the Strange Verses _describes the roots out of which this conflicted desire grows, and it explores how this desire mirrors the violence that undergirds the scandal itself. The book shows how readers seem to be confronted with a stark choice: either turn away from scandal completely or become enthralled and thus trapped by it. Using examples from philosophy, literature, and the Bible, Alberg leads the reader on a road out of this false dichotomy. By its nature, the author argues, scandal is the basis of our reading; it is the source of the obstacles that prevent us from understanding what we read, and of the bridges that lead to a deeper grasp of the truth. (shrink)

Can God change the past? The standard Aquinas line answers this question negatively: God cannot change the past since such an act implies a contradiction; thus is not within the purview of God's omnipotence. While the Aquinas line is well-known, there are other, non-standard solutions to this question. In this paper, I look into such answers. In particular, I explore those answers that employ the resources of gappy and glutty logics. I show how these solutions are motivated and how each (...) offers an alternative conception of what it is for God to be omnipotent. Finally, I consider and reply to potential issues that may be raised against these non-standard answers. (shrink)

In “A neglected reply to Prior’s dilemma” Beall [2012] presents a Weak Kleene framework where Prior’s dilemma for Hume’s no-ought-fromis thesis fails. It fails in the framework because addition, the inference rule that one of its horns relies on, is invalid. In this paper, we show that a more general result is necessary for the viability of Beall’s proposal – a result, which implies that Hume’s thesis holds in the proposed framework. We prove this result and thus show that Beall’s (...) proposal is indeed viable. (shrink)

Morphological EvoDevo is a field of biological inquiry in which explicit relations between evolutionary patterns and growth or morphogenetic processes are made. Historically, morphological EvoDevo results from the coming together of several traditions, notably Naturphilosophie, embryology, the study of heterochrony, and developmental constraints. A special feature binding different approaches to morphological EvoDevo is the use of formalisms and mathematical models. Here we will introduce anatomical network analysis, a new approach centered on connectivity patterns formed by anatomical parts, with its own (...) concepts and tools specifically designed for the study of morphological EvoDevo questions. Riedl’s concept of burden is tightly related to the use of anatomical networks, providing a nexus between the evolutionary patterns and the structural constraints that shape them. (shrink)

Higher education is seeing renewed calls for strengthening ethics education, yet there remains a dearth of research on the state of ethics education across undergraduate curricula. Research about ethics in higher education tends to be localized and often isolated to fields of graduate study. In contribution to a contemporary, landscape understanding of ethics education, we collected data on the placement and prevalence of ethics instruction within the general education curricula at 507 major U.S. colleges and universities. Our findings suggest that (...) 1) most schools in our study’s population do not explicitly require ethics as a part of their general education curricula; and 2) a school’s religiosity and research status are positively associated with explicitly requiring ethics instruction for its undergraduate student body. (shrink)

In this paper, I offer a reconstruction of Wittgenstein's view of the happy life by sketching out three interconnected themes in his early works. The first theme is the distinction between a science of ethics and the ethical. The second is the idea of the willing subject. And finally, the third is the possibility of the happy life.

A word from the wise is not to be discarded, O Phaedrus, but it is to be examined.The Socratic project is founded on the fallibility of those reputed to be wise, and the necessity of examining their wisdom. The importance of fallibility is clear enough in the Apology, in Socrates’s insistence that he is only wiser than others because he acknowledges his own ignorance. In Phaedrus, it is the basis of his distinction between the sophoi, the wise or learned, and (...) the philosophoi, the friends, allies or comrades of wisdom. This distinction suggests that we can maintain a relation to wisdom, we can be on the side of wisdom, but we cannot incarnate or possess wisdom. Those called sophoi are therefore more properly called... (shrink)

Most scholars suggest that Plato's academy served as a training ground for future statesmen in order that philosophy might influence politics. Yet scholars deny that later Platonic academies maintained this same political focus. It is assumed that they transformed into monastic asylums, allowing philosophers to escape worldly affairs. This article challenges the conventional reading through an interpretation of a commentary on Plato's Gorgias, written by an Alexandrian Neoplatonist who upholds his predecessor's political focus. He argues that the philosopher must be (...) concerned with the health of regimes and should accomplish this task by teaching statesmen, who can either advise those in power or pursue their own political ambitions. (shrink)

In his Formal Logic, Arthur N. Prior declared that Jan Łukasiewicz's logical notation is ‘unquestionably the best logical symbolism for most purposes’. Whether he had a substantive, and...

As the subtitle suggests, this book serves as a guide through Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. Those familiar with Yirmiyahu Yovel’s excellent work will find the usual clarity of writing and acuity...

In “God of the gaps: A neglected reply to God’s stone problem,” Jc Beall and A. J. Cotnoir offer a gappy solution to the paradox of the stone – a paradox that involves God’s omnipotence. This paper shows that their solution extends to a puzzle concerning God’s impeccability or inability to sin. This latter puzzle not only involves God’s omnipotence but also His omnibenevolence.

In an 1896 article for Kindergarten Magazine, John Dewey explained that the "child comes to school to do; to cook, to sew, to work with wood and tools in simple constructive acts; within and about these acts cluster the studies—writing, reading, arithmetic, etc."1 With this statement, Dewey encapsulated a key principle in the elementary education pedagogy he was at that time developing at the University of Chicago's Laboratory School. This school, which Dewey founded in 1896, explicitly experimented with new pedagogical (...) techniques. Ultimately, the Laboratory School's emphasis on occupations would become the most distinctive aspect of Dewey's and his colleagues' experimentation with educational... (shrink)

I examine chapters I and II of the Dialectic of Pure Practical Reason from the Critique of Practical Reason, to show that Kant resolved the antimony of practical reason by first giving an accurate representation of the cause of a properly moral act and then recognizing that this accurate representation raised further problems, problems that were anticipated by Rousseau, especially in his Reveries of a Solitary Walker. Rousseau’s reveries allowed Kant to explore, and to some extent overcome, the darker implications (...) of their common understanding of virtue. In the second Critique this takes the form of explaining how one can understand and existentially achieve one’s own satisfaction based on contentment with oneself rather than enjoyment. (shrink)

In this paper, I address the problem about the role of academic philosophy for the feminist movement. I argue that the professionalization of feminism, especially within the sphere of academic philosophy, is detrimental to the stated goal of the feminist movement, which, as historically understood, is to procure women’s rights and liberties and to reassess the treatment of women by different social institutions. The thought is that if feminism were to reap the rewards of a socio-political change, feminists should stop (...) their fantastic theorizing and start bringing their advocacies to the proper forums. (shrink)

Since its enactment in AD 313, the Edict of Milan, an edict that freed Christianity from empire-wide persecution, Constantine’s declaration has received a significant amount of attention within Christendom. Most of the discussion has centered on Constantine’s conversion, the precursor to the actual edict, with many suggesting that Constantine was acting more as a politician than a Christian. While this line of inquiry is legitimate, perhaps a better approach to the question may be more helpful to present-day Christians. That is, (...) while it is logical to deduce that every prudent politician will ignore the largest religious movement in his/her time at his/her own peril, Christians of every age will be better served if they critically evaluate their reception of each and every major policy that is clearly aimed at their benefit. With this background, this paper will attempt to critically examine the reception of Constantine’s edict by the Church in the years immediately following its enactment. Two early exhibits will be brought to bear here: the Donatist controversy and the Arian controversy. In so doing, the thesis that while Christians had every reason to celebrate the enactment of the edict, down the road, an uncritical adoption of the emperor’s policies and favors towards the church opened a door for an unhealthy marriage between earthly powers and the church that proved detrimental in the ensuing years, will be defended. As such, the Church’s reception of the Edict of Milan continues to be a lesson to Christians of every age in their relationship with the political leadership of their time. (shrink)

In akrasia, an agent intentionally acts against her own judgment about what it is best to do. This presents many puzzles for the understanding of human motivation. The Socrates of Plato's Protagoras, for example, denies this is possible because he claims that all action is motivated by an agent's belief about what is best. Plato himself seems to reject this view in the Republic, appealing to three distinct sources of motivation. This paper takes Plato's side in the general debate, arguing (...) for a new tripartite moral psychology. Because the akratic acts for a reason but against the conclusion of her practical reasoning, there must be a way of acting for reasons other than through reasoning about them. This way is desire. But once there is a division between reason and desire, a third capacity is needed to solve conflicts that can arise between them, the will. (shrink)

Papers from Binghamton University's Conferences on Medieval Latin Philosophy, 1995-2000, on St. Thomas Aquinas' oeuvre. The essays examine his sources within the Neoplatonic and Islamicist traditions, major themes in his writing, and his reflections on time and thought.