This chapter offers an opinionated introduction to higher-order formal languages with an eye towards their applications in metaphysics. A simply relationally typed higher-order language is introduced in four stages: starting with first-order logic, adding first-order predicate abstraction, generalizing to higher-order predicate abstraction, and finally adding higher-order quantification. It is argued that both β-conversion and Universal Instantiation are valid on the intended interpretation of this language. Given these two principles, it is then shown how we can use pure higher-order logic to (...) ask, and begin to answer, metaphysical questions with non-trivial implications. In particular, while we must reject the popular idea that structural differences between sentences correspond to parallel distinctions in the logical structure of extra-linguistic reality, it may still be possible to give a purely logical characterization of objectual aboutness and related notions. (shrink)

Introduction -- Fallibilism -- Contextualism -- Knowledge and reasons -- Justification -- Belief -- The value and importance of knowledge -- Infallibilism or pragmatic encroachment? -- Appendix I: Conflicts with bayesian decision theory? -- Appendix II: Does KJ entail infallibilism?

In this paper, I introduce a version of perdurantism called Priority Perdurantism, according to which perduring, four-dimensional objects are ontologically fundamental and the temporal parts of those objects are ontologically derivative, depending for their existence and their identity on the four-dimensional wholes of which they are parts. I argue that by switching the order of the priority relations this opens up new solutions to the too-many-thinkers problem and the personite problem – solutions that are more ontologically robust than standard maximality (...) solutions. I then consider and respond to two initial objections to the view: that it no longer counts as a perdurantist theory and that it reintroduces the problem of temporary intrinsics. I conclude by offering two further advantages of priority perdurantism: that it is consistent with hunky time and with the existence of irreducibly temporally-extended actions, such as those pertaining to deliberative agency. (shrink)

Since his death in 1986, Michel de Certeau's reputation as a thinker has steadily grown both in France and throughout the English-speaking world. His work is extraordinarily innovative and wide-ranging, cutting across issues in historiography, literary and cultural studies, anthropology, sociology, theology, philosophy and psychoanalysis. This book represents the first full-length study of Certeau's thought. It is organized around the central theme of interpretation and alterity, which Ahearne uses to illuminate Certeau's work as a whole. The author also examines Certeau's (...) theory and practice of historiography; his reflection on the relations between changing historical forms of writing, reading and orality; and his distinction between the "strategic" programmes of the politically powerful and the "tactics" of the relatively powerless. Ahearne places Certeau's work in its general intellectual context, relating it to the views of important contemporary thinkers, such as Pierre Bourdieu and Michel Foucault, and demonstrating the decisive importance to Certeau's thought of the writings of the early modern mystics and travellers. This book constitutes an excellent critical introduction to Certeau's work, while also providing a comprehensive and nuanced reading for those already familiar with his thought. (shrink)

In this review, I survey theoretical accounts of exploitation in business, chiefly through the example of low wage or sweatshop labor. This labor is associated with wages that fall below a living wage standard and include long working hours. Labor of this kind is often described as self-evidently exploitative and immoral (Van Natta 1995). But for those who defend sweatshop labor as the first rung on a ladder toward greater economic development, the charge that sweatshop labor is self-evidently exploitative fails (...) adequately to explain the nature of the alleged wrongdoing. While all sides might agree that poor working conditions are unfortunate and undesirable, defenders of sweatshop labor argue that they provide the best available employment alternative for some workers and the best chance at economic development for many low and middle income countries (LMICs). Some defenders of sweatshop labor even embrace the label of exploitation. <br><br>Unless there is a clear, widely understood account by which exploitation is a moral wrong, then charging a practice as exploitative will do little to advance debates over whether and why a practice is morally problematic. A considerable body of work has been developed applying a growing literature on exploitation to sweatshop labor. While many forms of moral wrong are associated with sweatshop labor, I will focus specifically on the worry that low wages allow relatively wealthy employers wrongfully to take advantage of or gain from relatively poor workers, especially in LMICs. In particular, I will focus on instances of alleged exploitation in employment relationships that are voluntary and mutually beneficial. I have two reasons for doing so. First, by restricting this review to voluntary and mutually beneficial instances of exploitation, I can isolate the moral wrong of exploitation from other moral wrongs, especially the wrongs of coercion and outright harms to workers. Second, the focus on mutually beneficial and voluntary relationships will allow for arguments that sweatshop labor is not only not exploitative, but is a morally praiseworthy means of helping to encourage economic growth in poor areas of the world and to provide jobs that pay better and are more stable than any existing alternatives.<br><br>In this review, I aim to accomplish three goals. First, I will provide an overview of the many different uses of the charge of exploitation in business practice through an examination of the uses of the term in the literature on sweatshop labor. While it is often not clear what kind of moral wrong is assumed to take place when the charge of exploitation is used, I will demonstrate that many distinct types of exploitation, connected to distinct moral wrongs, are used in the literature on sweatshop labor and elsewhere in business ethics. Specifically, I will identify two broad categories of exploitation—exploitation as unfairness and exploitation as the mere use of others—with subgroups under each main category of exploitation. Second, I will discuss which of these senses of exploitation are defensible as identifying clear moral wrongs that take place in the context of business and, specifically, sweatshop labor. As I will argue, not all uses of the charge of exploitation are capable of persuasively identifying clear moral wrongs. Moreover, there is not a single, clear type of exploitation that takes place in business but, rather, several distinct forms. Third, I will apply the lessons learned from my exploration of exploitation in sweatshop labor to other specific areas of business. As I will argue, there are multiple viable models of exploitation in the sweatshop literature that can illuminate exploitative practices of relatively well compensated employees, customers, suppliers, and entire communities. <br><br>While discussions of theories of exploitation tend to argue for a single, correct account of this moral wrong, my review of the literature on exploitation in sweatshop labor supports the conclusion that there are multiple defensible accounts of the moral wrong of exploitation. For this reason, those who would charge that a relationship is exploitative should specify the form of exploitation that they believe is taking place. (shrink)

We present a formal system, E, which provides a faithful model of the proofs in Euclid's Elements, including the use of diagrammatic reasoning.

Debates about the ethics and effects of placebos and whether ‘placebos’ in clinical trials of complex treatments such as acupuncture are adequate rage. Yet there is currently no widely accepted definition of the ‘placebo’. A definition of the placebo is likely to inform these controversies. Grünbaum’s characterization of placebos and placebo effects has been touted by some authors as the best attempt thus far, but has not won widespread acceptance largely because Grünbaum failed to specify what he means by a (...) therapeutic theory and because he does not stipulate a special role for expectation effects. Grünbaum claims that placebos are treatments whose ‘characteristic features’ do not have therapeutic effects on the target disorder. I show that with four modifications, Grünbaum’s definition provides a defensible account of placebos for the purpose of constructing placebo controls within clinical trials. The modifications I introduce are: adding a special role for expectations, insisting that placebo controls control for all and only the effects of the incidental treatment features, relativizing the definition of placebos to patients, and introducing harmful interventions and nocebos to the definitional scheme. I also provide guidance for classifying treatment features as characteristic or incidental. (shrink)

A resilient issue in research ethics is whether and when a placebo-controlled trial is justified if it deprives research subjects of a recognized treatment. The clinicians' moral duty to provide the best available care seems to require the use of ‘active’ controlled trials that use an established treatment as a control whenever such a therapy is available. In another regard, ACTs are supposedly methodologically inferior to PCTs. Hence, the moral duty of the clinical researcher to use the best methods will (...) favor PCTs. In this target article, I analyze the three reasons for believing that ACTs are inferior to PCTs namely: 1) ACTs lack ‘assay sensitivity’; 2) ACTs do not measure absolute effect size; and 3) ACTs require more participants; and I contend that none are acceptable. Consequently the tension between clinical and research ethics dissolves: the moral duty of the clinician to avoid PCTs is unopposed by methodological considerations. (shrink)

Sufism and Early Islamic Piety: Personal and Communal Dynamics. By Arin Shawkat Salamah-Qudsi. Cambridge: camBridge universiTy Press, 2019. Pp. xvii + 315. $99.99, £75 ; $80.

This essay overcomes the division between “principled” and “strategic” approaches to nonviolence studies by demonstrating that ethical analysis is key to understanding movement strategy. I show how the moral phenomenologies of Martin Luther King Jr. and Emmanuel Lévinas, figures usually treated by scholars of principled nonviolence, possess genuine insight for nonviolent strategists. With reference to each thinker and supporting evidence from the #BlackLivesMatter movement, I argue that nonviolent resistance makes a moral appeal through the medium of the body to the (...) conscience of those bearing witness. Analysis of the way King combined moral reflection and strategic action recovers his legacy for the pragmatic tradition of social thought, while Lévinas's theory of the face offers additional considerations for nonviolent practitioners aiming for moral transformation at the local level. Studies that elucidate the complex moral dynamics by which nonviolent movements either succeed or fail will make the field a greater asset to practitioners. (shrink)

In a series of recent papers, Timothy Williamson has argued for the surprising conclusion that there are cases in which you know a proposition in spite of its being overwhelmingly improbable given what you know that you know it. His argument relies on certain formal models of our imprecise knowledge of the values of perceptible and measurable magnitudes. This paper suggests an alternative class of models that do not predict this sort of improbable knowing. I show that such models are (...) motivated by independently plausible principles in the epistemology of perception, the epistemology of estimation, and concerning the connection between knowledge and justified belief. (shrink)

In this paper we present a schema for describing dualities between physical theories, and illustrate it in detail with the example of bosonization: a boson-fermion duality in two-dimensional quantum field theory. The schema develops proposals in De Haro : these proposals include construals of notions related to duality, like representation, model, symmetry and interpretation. The aim of the schema is to give a more precise criterion for duality than has so far been considered. The bosonization example, or boson-fermion duality, has (...) the feature of being simple, yet rich enough, to illustrate the most relevant aspects of our schema, which also apply to more sophisticated dualities. The richness of the example consists, mainly, in its concern with two non-trivial quantum field theories: including massive Thirring-sine-Gordon duality, and non-abelian bosonization. This prompts two comparisons with the recent philosophical literature on dualities:--- Unlike the standard cases of duality in quantum field theory and string theory, where only specific simplifying limits of the theories are explicitly known, the boson-fermion duality is known to hold {\it exactly}. This exactness can be exhibited explicitly. The bosonization example illustrates both the cases of isomorphic and {\it non-isomorphic} models: which we believe the literature on dualities has not so far discussed. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Welfare states are often urged to secure a social minimum for citizens—a level of material well‐being beneath which no‐one should be permitted to fall. This paper examines the justification for such a claim. It begins by criticising John Rawls's rejection of the social minimum approach to justice in A Theory of Justice: the argument Rawls uses to justify the Difference Principle, based on what he calls ‘the strains of commitment’ in the ‘original position’, actually provides a better justification for (...) a social minimum principle. The paper then examines the substance of that argument outside the context of Rawls's contractarianism, showing that there is a general case for seeing to it that desperate need does not go unmet in a liberal society. (shrink)

Regulating affective responses to acute stress has the potential to improve health, performance, and well-being outcomes. Using the biopsychosocial model of challenge and threat as an organizing framework, we review how appraisals inform affective responses and highlight research that demonstrates how appraisals can be used as regulatory tools. Arousal reappraisal, specifically, instructs individuals on the adaptive benefits of stress arousal so that arousal is conceptualized as a coping resource. By reframing the meaning of signs of arousal that accompany stress, it (...) is possible to break the link between stressful situations, and malignant physiological responses and experiences of negative affect. Applications of arousal reappraisal for academic contexts and clinical science, and directions for future research are discussed. (shrink)

Existing accounts of the Rule of Law are inadequate and require fleshing out. The main value of the ideal of rule of law for liberal political theory lies in the notion of predictability, which is essential to individual autonomy. The author examines this connection and argues that conservative theories of rule of law claim too much. Liberal theory equates the rule of law with legality, which is only one of the elements necessary for a just social order.

Hypnosis is considered a unique tool capable of modulating cognitive processes. The extent to which hypnotic suggestions intervenes is still under debate. This study was designed to provide a new insight into this issue, by focusing on an unintentional emotional process: attentional bias. In Experiment 1, highly suggestible participants performed three sessions of an emotional Stroop task where hypnotic suggestions aiming to increase and decrease emotional reactivity towards emotional stimuli were administered within an intra-individual design. Compared to a baseline condition (...) (without hypnotic suggestion), a significant increase in attentional bias was found when a hypnotic suggestion to increase emotional reactivity was administered. In contrast, the bias was eliminated when a suggestion to decrease emotional reactivity was administered. Experiment 2 investigated the effect of session repetition on attentional bias across three successive experimental sessions without hypnosis, and showed that the emotional Stroop effect did not vary across sessions. Hence, session repetition could not account for part of the modulation of attentional bias in Experiment 1. Taken together, the results suggest that specific hypnotic suggestions can influence elicitation of unintentional emotional processing. The implications are discussed regarding the locus of intervention of hypnotic suggestion in cognitive and emotional processes. (shrink)

The COVID-19 pandemic has brought the long-standing public health practice of contact tracing into the public spotlight. While contact tracing and case investigation have been carefully designed to protect privacy, the huge volume of tracing which is being carried out as part of the pandemic response in the United States is highlighting potential concerns around privacy, legality, and equity. Contact tracing during the pandemic has gained particular attention for the new use of digital technologies—both on the consumer side in the (...) form of Exposure Notification applications, and for public health agencies as digital case management software systems enable massive scaling of operations. While the consumer application side of digital innovation has dominated the news and academic discourse around privacy, people are likely to interact more intensively with public health agencies and their use of digital case management systems. Effective use of digital case management for contact tracing requires revisiting the existing legal frameworks, privacy protections, and security practices for management of sensitive health data. The scale of these tools and demands of an unprecedented pandemic response are introducing new risks through the collection of huge volumes of data, and expanding requirements for more adept data sharing among jurisdictions. Public health agencies must strengthen their best practices for data collection and protection even in the absence of comprehensive or clear guidance. This requires navigating a difficult balance between rigorous data protection and remaining highly adaptive and agile. (shrink)

We use model-theoretic methods described in [3] to obtain ordinal analyses of a number of theories of first- and second-order arithmetic, whose proof-theoretic ordinals are less than or equal to Γ0.

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be (...) preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. To ensure a quality reading experience, this work has been proofread and republished using a format that seamlessly blends the original graphical elements with text in an easy-to-read typeface. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

The biopsychosocial model of challenge and threat posits that resource and demand appraisals interact in situations of acute stress to determine affective responses, and concomitant physiological responses, motivation, and decisions/behaviors. Regulatory approaches that alter appraisals to regulate challenge and threat affective states have the potential to facilitate coping. This reply clarifies the conceptualization of one such regulatory approach, arousal reappraisal, and suggests avenues for future research. However, it is important to note that arousal reappraisal is not a “silver bullet” for (...) improving stress outcomes, nor should this strategy be expected to positively impact all individuals. More work is needed to better elucidate how psychological and biological stress processes interact to shape health. (shrink)

We use the normality framework of Goodman and Salow (2018, 2021, 2023b) to investigate of dynamics of rational belief. The guiding idea is that people are entitled to believe that their circumstances aren’t especially abnormal. More precisely, a rational agent’s beliefs rule out all and only those possibilities that are either (i) ruled out by their evidence or (ii) sufficiently less normal than some other possibility not ruled out by their evidence. Working within this framework, we argue that the logic (...) of rational belief revision is much weaker than is usually supposed. We do so by isolating a natural family of orthodox principles about belief revision, describing realistic cases in which these principles seem to fail, and showing how these counterexamples are predicted by independently motivated models of the cases in question. In these models, whether one evidential possibility counts as sufficiently less normal than another is determined by underlying probabilities (together with a contextually determined question). We argue that the resulting probabilistic account of belief compares favorably with other such accounts, including Lockeanism (Foley, 1993), a ‘stability’ account inspired by Leitgeb (2017), the ‘tracking theory’ of Lin and Kelly (2012), and the influential precursor of Levi (1967). We show that all of these accounts yield subtly different but similarly heterodox logics of belief revision. (shrink)

This is one of two papers about emergence, reduction and supervenience. It expounds these notions and analyses the general relations between them. The companion paper analyses the situation in physics, especially limiting relations between physical theories. I shall take emergence as behaviour that is novel and robust relative to some comparison class. I shall take reduction as deduction using appropriate auxiliary definitions. And I shall take supervenience as a weakening of reduction, viz. to allow infinitely long definitions. The overall claim (...) of this paper will be that emergence is logically independent both of reduction and of supervenience. In particular, one can have emergence with reduction, as well as without it; and emergence without supervenience, as well as with it. Of the subsidiary claims, the four main ones are: : I defend the traditional Nagelian conception of reduction ; : I deny that the multiple realizability argument causes trouble for reductions, or ``reductionism'' ; : I stress the collapse of supervenience into deduction via Beth's theorem ; : I adapt some examples already in the literature to show supervenience without emergence and vice versa. (shrink)

The prime number theorem, established by Hadamard and de la Vallée Poussin independently in 1896, asserts that the density of primes in the positive integers is asymptotic to 1/ln x. Whereas their proofs made serious use of the methods of complex analysis, elementary proofs were provided by Selberg and Erdos in 1948. We describe a formally verified version of Selberg's proof, obtained using the Isabelle proof assistant.

The ethical and political dilemmas raised byInformation and Communication Technology (ICT)have only just begun to be understood. Theimpact of centralised data collection, masscommunication technologies or the centrality ofcomputer technology as a means of accessingimportant social institutions, all poseimportant ethical and political questions. As away of capturing some of these effects I willcharacterise them in terms of the type of powerand, more particularly, the ‘Power-over’ peoplethat they exercise. My choice of thisparticular nomenclature is that it allows us todescribe, firstly, how specific (...) technologiesoperate and second, exactly what sorts ofconstraints they impose on people. The reasonfor this focus has to do with a further aim ofthe essay, which is to intervene in aparticular type of debate that is often hadaround the appropriate use and scope oftheories of power that are employed in thinkingabout ICT, especially those theories associatedwith the work of Michel Foucault. There isconsiderable use of his work in computerethics, but my claim will be that despite theproductive uses of his work in the areas ofsurveillance, for instance, it does not exhaustthe larger potential of his work on power and,in part, `government.' I will argue that inorder to properly understand the politicalimpact of some aspects of ICT, especially thedigital divide, one needs an account of howpower operates that includes more traditionaltypes of power-over. To the extent that I willdeal with these concerns, the paper is both acontribution to debates about the nature andscope of Foucault's theory of power and to theissue of the effects of the digital divide. (shrink)

It is often suggested that, since the state of affairs in which God creates a good universe is better than the state of affairs in which He creates nothing, a perfectly good God would have to create that good universe. Making use of recent work by Christine Korgaard on the relational nature of the good, I argue that the state of affairs in which God creates is actually not better, due to the fact that it is not better for anyone (...) or anything in particular. Hence, even a perfectly good God would not be compelled to create a good universe. (shrink)

The ontology of medicine—the question of whether disease entities are real or not—is an underdeveloped area of philosophical inquiry. This essay explains the primary question at issue in medical ontology, discusses why answering this question is important from both a philosophical and a practical perspective, and argues that the problem of medical ontology is unique, i.e., distinct, from the ontological problems raised by other sciences and therefore requires its own analysis.

In Science, Truth, and Democracy, Philip Kitcher challenges the view that science has a single, context‐independent, goal, and that the pursuit of this goal is essentially immune from moral critique. He substitutes a context‐dependent account of science’s goal, and shows that this account subjects science to moral evaluation. I argue that Kitcher’s approach must be modified, as his account of science ultimately must be explicated in terms of moral concepts. I attempt, therefore, to give an account of science’s goal that (...) is free of direct moral entanglements but still makes this goal context‐dependent and leaves the choice of which projects to pursue subject to moral scrutiny. (shrink)

Mathematicians use the word ‘deep’ to convey a high appreciation of a concept, theorem, or proof. This paper investigates the extent to which the term can be said to have an objective character by examining its first use in mathematics. It was a consequence of Gauss's work on number theory and the agreement among his successors that specific parts of Gauss's work were deep, on grounds that indicate that depth was a structural feature of mathematics for them. In contrast, French (...) mathematicians had a less structural, more problem-oriented approach to mathematics and did not speak of depth so readily. (shrink)

The dominated convergence theorem implies that if is a sequence of functions on a probability space taking values in the interval [0, 1], and converges pointwise a.e., then converges to the integral of the pointwise limit. Tao [26] has proved a quantitative version of this theorem: given a uniform bound on the rates of metastable convergence in the hypothesis, there is a bound on the rate of metastable convergence in the conclusion that is independent of the sequence and the underlying (...) space. We prove a slight strengthening of Tao’s theorem which, moreover, provides an explicit description of the second bound in terms of the first. Specifically, we show that when the first bound is given by a continuous functional, the bound in the conclusion can be computed by a recursion along the tree of unsecured sequences. We also establish a quantitative version of Egorov’s theorem, and introduce a new mode of convergence related to these notions. (shrink)

From ancient times to the beginning of the nineteenth century, mathematics was commonly viewed as the general science of quantity, with two main branches: geometry, which deals with continuous quantities, and arithmetic, which deals with quantities that are discrete. Mathematical logic does not fit neatly into this taxonomy. In 1847, George Boole [1] offered an alternative characterization of the subject in order to make room for this new discipline: mathematics should be understood to include the use of any symbolic calculus (...) “whose laws of combination are known and general, and whose results admit of a consistent interpretation.” Depending on the laws chosen, symbols can just as well be used to represent propositions instead of quantities; in that way, one can consider calculations with propositions on par with more familiar arithmetic calculations. Despite Boole’s efforts, logic has always held an uncertain place in the mathematical community. This can partially be attributed to its youth; while number theory and geometry have their origins in antiquity, mathematical logic did not emerge as a recognizable discipline until the latter half of the nineteenth century, and so lacks the provenance and prestige of its elder companions. Furthermore, the nature of the subject matter serves to set it apart; as objects of mathematical study, formulas and proofs do not have the same character as groups, topological spaces, and measures. Even distinctly mathematical branches of contemporary logic, like model theory and set theory, tend to employ linguistic classifications and measures of complexity that are alien to other mathematical disciplines. The Birth of Model Theory, by Calixto Badesa, describes a seminal step in the emergence of logic as a mature mathematical discipline. As its title suggests, the focus is on one particular result, now referred to as the L¨owenheim-Skolem theorem, as presented in a paper by L¨owenheim in 1915. But the book is, more broadly, about the story of the logic community’s gradual coming to the modern distinction between syntax and semantics, that is, between systems of symbolic expressions and the meanings that can be assigned to them.. (shrink)

On September 6, 2004, using the Isabelle proof assistant, I verified the following statement: (%x. pi x * ln (real x) / (real x)) ----> 1 The system thereby confirmed that the prime number theorem is a consequence of the axioms of higher-order logic together with an axiom asserting the existence of an infinite set. All told, our number theory session, including the proof of the prime number theorem and supporting libraries, constitutes 673 pages of proof scripts, or roughly 30,000 (...) lines. This count includes about 65 pages of elementary number theory that we had at the outset, developed by Larry Paulson and others; also about 50 pages devoted to a proof of the law of quadratic reciprocity and properties of Euler’s ϕ function, neither of which are used in the proof of the prime number theorem. The page count does not include the basic HOL library, or properties of the real numbers that we obtained from the HOL-Complex library. (shrink)

Hilbert’s program: • Formalize abstract, infinitary, nonconstructive mathematics. • Prove consistency using only finitary methods.

In the theory of programming languages, type inference is the process of inferring the type of an expression automatically, often making use of information from the context in which the expression appears. Such mechanisms turn out to be extremely useful in the practice of interactive theorem proving, whereby users interact with a computational proof assistant to constructformal axiomatic derivations of mathematical theorems. This article explains some of the mechanisms for type inference used by the "Mathematical Components" project, which is working (...) towards a verification of the Feit-Thompson theorem. (shrink)

The first part of this paper surveys the current literature in the history of nineteenth-century mathematics in order to show that the question “Did the increasing abstraction of mathematics lead to a sense of anxiety?” is a new and valid question. I argue that the mathematics of the nineteenth century is marked by a growing appreciation of error leading to a note of anxiety, hesitant at first but persistent by 1900. This mounting disquiet about so many aspects of mathematics after (...) 1850 is seldom discussed. The second part explores the issue of anxiety in mathematical life through an interesting account of an address made by a mathematician in 1911, Oscar Perron. The third and final part ventures some conclusions about the value of anxiety as a question for historians of mathematics to pursue. (shrink)

Swinburne relies on principle P in The Existence of God to argue that God is simple and thus likely to exist. In this paper, I argue that Swinburne does not support P. In particular, his arguments from mathematical simplicity and scientists’ preferences both fail. Given the central role P plays in Swinburne’s overall argument in The Existence of God , I conclude that Swinburne should further support P if his argument that God likely exists is to be persuasive.

This essay aims to examine metropolitan cities of Latin America with two aspects of the literature in anthropology, history, and sociology in mind. First, the essay addresses an imbalanced focus on cities in the USA and Canada by sketching the significance of migration, creation, and urban development in four major metropolises of Latin America. Second, in place of a framework of urban imaginaries, which has dominated the sociology of Latin American cities in recent years, I argue for a more precise (...) notion of metropolitan imaginaries that better frames the creativity of particular cities and their level of integration into international and regional networks. With this more precise notion, I distinguish southern cities as highly connected places, which attract migrants and bring economic and cultural traffic to their shores, ports, plazas, and streets. They are lively centers of Atlantic modernity with connections that generate greater magnitude for creativity and, as such, bear international significance as places of architecture and urban design. In their informal settlements, impulses of organic creation further distinguish southern metropolises from their North American counterparts. The quality of international and regional connections distinguishes these cities from other urban centers in Latin America, a point underestimated in the literature on urban imaginaries. In this essay, I examine 19th and 20th-century Buenos Aires, Mexico City, São Paulo, and Rio de Janeiro. Each is distinguished from most cities by the magnitude of migration, the diversity of their populations, and the connections they have to global and regional developments. Crucially, each one stands out for the quality and impact of their metropolis-making, particularly in creative architecture and urban design. (shrink)

ArgumentIt would have been easy for a less imaginative historian of mathematics than Herbert Mehrtens to have portrayed the work of Hilbert, Hausdorff, and other modernists as pioneers, and those who did not subscribe to their program as people who failed, were not good enough to make the turn, and were eventually and convincingly left behind. That he did not do so is not only because this would have been a shallow, selective view of the facts: it is incompatible with (...) his Foucauldian approach to the relations between knowledge and power. Instead, he defined what I see as the most intriguing category of actor in his Moderne—Sprache—Mathematik (1990), the Gegenmoderner, or counter-moderns. The three men who characterize this position are Felix Klein, Henri Poincaré, and Luitzen Brouwer, and each merits a section in the book.Of the three, Poincaré is the hardest to contain within that category. The range of his work, the nature of his influence, and the shifting standards by which mathematical significance has been evaluated by mathematicians, historians of mathematics, and society at large, all contribute to the problem. After thirty years, the methodological presumptions and aspirations of historians of mathematics have also changed, and I shall suggest that one way to appreciate the richness of Mehrtens’ book, to gain insight into what is meant by mathematical modernism, and to acknowledge a generation of work by other historians since 1990, is to re-examine aspects of Poincaré’s life and work and scholarship about him. Prodded by remarks by Leo Corry, Moritz Epple, and David Rowe, I shall suggest that the simple but useful dichotomy modern/counter-modern must be seen as a way into a more complicated situation, one in which different aspects of mathematics, specifically applied mathematics and the relationship of mathematics to contemporary physics, require fresh accounts of the role of modern mathematics in society. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Melancholy and the Therapeutic Language of Moral Philosophy in Seventeenth-Century ThoughtJeremy SchmidtThe concept of melancholy comprehended a wide range of characteristics and conditions in seventeenth-century European culture, from the brooding introspection of the genius and the scholar to a condition of delirious and delusory madness.1 Its central and most immediately identifiable characteristic, however, was the excessive and unreasonable nature of its symptomologically defining emotions of fear and sorrow. As (...) Robert Burton noted out in The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), the melancholic condition was commonly taken to be "a kind of dotage without fever, having for his ordinary companions fear and sadness, without any apparent occasion."2 The presence of a pervasive and unreasonable sense of fear and sorrow invariably solicited the melancholic label. Indeed, melancholic emotions were the primary substance of melancholic dotage; the ravings of the melancholically mad and their frequent obsession with a single idea were often driven by an overwhelming feeling of fear and sorrow.3The concept of melancholy as a mental disorder involving these specific emotions had coalesced under the gaze of medical observation in ancient Greece, and the melancholic condition was thought by many medical theorists of classical [End Page 583] antiquity to be caused by a physiological surfeit of black bile, the Greek word for which was melancholia.4 Western medicine, profoundly influenced by the Greek medical tradition, continued to diagnose and treat melancholic disturbance as a physical distemper well into the nineteenth century. Yet the kind of mental anguish which early medical observers labeled melancholic bore a striking resemblance to forms of emotional disorder whose point of origin was thought to be the mind itself. Various traditions of classical moral philosophy sought to treat disorders of the mind that unchecked emotion could create primarily by directing, ordering, and correcting the thought of the sufferer. Where the melancholic condition displayed qualities of the emotions as these were represented and analyzed by moral philosophers it was viewed as susceptible to philosophical treatment and insight.5Early modern English writers, no less than classical writers, thought it appropriate to apply to cases of melancholy therapies derived from the philosophic endeavor to define and achieve peace of mind. Burton argued explicitly in The Anatomy of Melancholy for the rightful authority of the philosophical "physician of the soul" in the treatment of melancholy; and the conceptual similarity of melancholy to moral diseases of the soul which provided the basis for this authority is evidenced in the works of several seventeenth-century moralists, as well as in the writings of the influential seventeenth-century physician and natural philosopher Thomas Willis on melancholy and the passions. Willis noted that melancholic emotions were structured and caused by the judgments of the mind rather than by the force of physiological dysfunction alone. His recognition of the importance of the mental aspects of melancholy provided the basis for his prescription of moral therapies for the government of the mind in addition to therapies for the body. Moreover, his writing on the passion of grief displays the ability of moral philosophical language to represent melancholic-like states as problems of the moral life, to be engaged through rational meditation and control.The importance of moral philosophy in understanding and treating melancholy has been largely ignored in current scholarship in the history of psychiatry and madness, which has concentrated on early modern medical concepts of mental disorder that traced its origins to the body. The historian of psychiatry and "madness" Roy Porter has, for instance, referred to Willis's medical writings as evidence for the "thoroughgoing somatic grounding of disorders of thought, feeling and behavior" that he alleged to have dominated the era's medical [End Page 584] conceptualization and treatment of madness.6 While Michel Foucault insightfully noted that Willis's ostensibly chemical account of the nature of melancholy was in fact "a phenomenology of the melancholic experience," he dismissed out of hand the relevance of classical moral philosophical language to the early modern treatment of madness, asserting the complete absence of moral treatments of madness until the end of the eighteenth century.7 In analyzing Willis's writing he thus failed to note the broader moral philosophical... (shrink)

: In light of information uncovered about human radiation experiments conducted during the Cold War, an important charge for the Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments was to assess the current state of protections for human research subjects. This assessment was designed to enhance the Committee's ability to make informed recommendations for the improvement of future policies and practices for the protection of research subjects. The Committee's examination of current protections revealed great improvement over those from the past, yet some (...) problems remain. Although the data collected by the Committee highlight specific areas in need of attention, the Committee's work should be viewed in part as the beginning of a series of ongoing assessments of the adequacy and effectiveness of the protections afforded to human subjects. (shrink)