Aldo Leopold’s land ethic calls for an extension of ethical consideration to nonhuman components of the complex system he called “the land.” Although the basis for this extension was holistic, interpretations of Leopold’s holism leave one baffled at how he could see his land ethic as an extension of a system which recognizes individual human rights. Leopold’s critics and exponents alike have focused on the holism expressed in his definition of right and wrong. Both regard it as a working criterion (...) of morality to be applied directly to conduct, act by act. Both are mistaken. Leopold was an indirect holist, not a direct one. That is, he applied his holistic definition of right and wrong not as a role for judging conduct directly, case by case, but as a principle for judging conduct only indirectly by judging the roles, tastes, predilections, practices, and attitudes which influence it. (shrink)

We show that several theorems on ordinal bounds in different parts of logic are simple consequences of a basic result in the theory of global inductive definitions.

Burgess, J.P. and Rosen, G. Subject with No ObjectElliott, R.Faking Nature.

Drug-impaired driving is a growing problem in the U.S. States regulate drug-impaired driving in different ways. Some do not name specific drugs or amounts. Others do identify specific drugs and may regulate cannabis separately. We provide up-to-date information about these state laws.

This paper describes our solution to the problem of inducing ontological information from metadata provided informally. The metadata is in the form of linguistic tags attached to items in an on-lin...

Nietzsche est trop mal connu et trop méconnu. On lui a fait dire tout et n'importe quoi! On l'a dit nihiliste, lui qui a éreinté le nihilisme. On a fait de lui un misanthrope violent, lui qui était la courtoisie, la sensibilité et la douceur mêmes. On a voulu faire de lui un précurseur du nazisme, lui, l'ami des Juifs qui ne haïssait tant rien que le militarisme et le germanisme. On sait que Nietzsche proclamait que "Dieu est mort!". Mais (...) sait-on de quel Dieu il parlait et sait-on qu'il fut le prophète de la Vie et de l'Amour du Destin... On sait que Nietzsche était un philosophe du soupçon et le pourfendeur de toutes les espérances. (shrink)

Between 1993 and 2002, 39 clinical trial staff were investigated for scientific misconduct by the Office of Research Integrity (ORI). Analysis of ORI case records reveals practices regarding workload, training and supervision that enable misconduct. Considering the potential effects on human subjects protection, quality and reliability of data, and the trustworthiness of the clinical research enterprise, regulations or guidance on use of clinical trial staff ought to be available. Current ORI regulations do not hold investigators or institutions responsible for supervision (...) and training of clinical trial staff. Given the important issues at stake, the definition of research misconduct should encompass the intentional or negligent mismanagement of scientific projects. Individual institutions and professional associations not only can but should adopt stricter standards of conduct than those reflected in federal regulations. (shrink)

The rapidly changing field of genetics affects society through advances in health-care and through implications of genetic research. This study addresses the impacts of new genetic discoveries and technologies on different segments of today's society. The book begins with a chapter on genetic complexity, and subsequent chapters discuss moral and ethical questions arising from today's genetics from the perspectives of health care professionals, the media, the general public, special interest groups and commercial interests.

This book taps the best American thinkers to answer the essential American question: How do we sustain our experiment in government of, by, and for the people? Authored by an extraordinary and politically diverse roster of public officials, scholars, and educators, these chapters describe our nation's civic education problem, assess its causes, offer an agenda for reform, and explain the high stakes at risk if we fail.

1, . . . , n | ≈ ψ ? Here 1, . . . , n, ψ are premisses of some formal language, such as a propositional language or a predicate language. | ≈ is an entailment relation: the entailment holds if all models of the premisses also satisfy the conclusion, where the logic provides some suitable notion of ‘model’ and ‘satisfy’. Proof theory is normally invoked to answer a question of this form: one tries to prove the conclusion (...) from the premisses in a finite sequence of steps, where at each step one invokes an axiom or applies a rule of inference. (shrink)

First published: Mahwah, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2005.

In this paper I explore informationalism, a pragmatic theory of modality that seems to solve some serious problems in the familiar possible worlds accounts of modality. I view the theory as an elaboration of Stalnaker's moderate modal realism, though it also derives from Dretske's semantic theory of information. Informationalism is presented in Section 2 after the prerequisite stage setting in Section 1. Some applications are sketched in Section 3. Finally, a mathematical model of the theory is developed in Section 4.How (...) many times have I said to you that when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth? (Arthur Conan Doyle)You've put me in an impossible situation. (Anonymous)[N]othing we imagine is absolutely impossible. (David Hume). (shrink)

İlk dönem İslâm fırkalarından biri olan İbâziyye, Türkiye’de İslâm mezhepleri tarihi başta olmak üzere kelâm, hadis, tefsir, fıkıh gibi bilim dalları kapsamında incelenmiş ve önemli akademik araştırmalara konu olmuştur. Cumhuriyet döneminde İbâziyye fırkasına dair yapılan akademik araştırmalar bilhassa yirmi birinci yüzyılda hızlı bir artış göstermiştir. Bu çalışmada İslâm mezhepleri tarihi alanı başta olmak üzere İslâmî ilimlerde İbâzîlik üzerine yazılan kitap, lisansüstü tez, makale ve bildirilerin bir bibliyografyası hazırlanmış ve Cumhuriyet döneminde İbâziyye araştırmalarının tarihi seyri incelenmiştir. İslâm mezhepleri tarihi bilim dalında (...) İbâzîlik üzerine yapılan çalışmalarda iki temel yaklaşımın benimsendiği görülmüştür. Birinci yaklaşıma göre, Sünnî bakış açısıyla geleneksel mezhepler tarihi kaynakları esas alınarak, İbâziyye Hâricîlerin devamı olarak kabul edilmiştir. Bununla birlikte İbâzîlerin bu konudaki itirazları göz ardı edilmiştir. İkinci yaklaşıma göre ise, Sünnî kaynakların yanında İbâzî kaynaklar da esas alınarak fırka anlaşılmaya çalışılmıştır. Burada müellifler İbâziyye’yi kendi kaynakları üzerinden tanımlayarak, Hâriciyye’den bağımsız bir mezhep olarak değerlendirmişlerdir. İbâziyye’nin Hâricî düşünce yapısından farklılaşan yaklaşımları nedeniyle onlardan ayrılarak, günümüze kadar ulaşmayı başardığını vurgulamışlardır. Mezheplere ilişkin yapılan araştırmalarda objektif veriler ortaya koymak için kaynakların karşılaştırmalı olarak ele alınması gerekmektedir. Aksi hâlde yapılan çalışmalar, doğru verileri yansıtmak yerine sonuçları bilimsellikten uzak, tek taraflı bakış açısının ürünü olarak kalmaktadır. Bu sebeple fırkalar incelenirken, kendi kaynaklarındaki tanımlamalarına da yer verilmelidir. Ancak İbâziyye fırkasına ilişkin kaynakların birçoğunun günümüze kadar ulaşmamış olması yahut siyasî, itikadî, fıkhî görüşlerinin yeterince tanınmamış olması gibi nedenler; İbâziyye’nin gerçekte olandan farklı bir zeminde, yanlış bilgiler üzerinden tanınmasına sebebiyet vermiştir. Bunun yanı sıra mezheplerin, teşekkül sürecinin ardından sistematik hâle gelmesine kadar ki dönemde dinamik yapıda olmaları da göz ardı edilmemesi gereken bir diğer husustur. Bu bağlamda araştırmacılar İbâziyye mezhebinin ortaya çıkışından sistematikleşmesine değin oluşturduğu kendine has görüşleri açıklığa kavuştururken, birincil kaynaklar üzerinden mukayeseli okumalar yaparak, bütüncül olarak analiz etmeleri gerekmektedir. Çalışmamızda Cumhuriyetin ilk yıllarından günümüze kadar İbâzîlik üzerine yapılan araştırmaların bir bibliyografyasını sunduk ve yukarıda belirtilen yaklaşım biçimlerini analiz ettik. Bu kapsamda İslâmî ilimler literatüründe İbâziyye fırkasına ilişkin veriler sunan araştırmacıların konuya dair yaklaşımlarını literatür taraması sonucunda tespit ederek kronolojik olarak sıraladık. Araştırmamız neticesinde, İbâzîlerin kendi kaynaklarını temel alan özgün akademik çalışmaların uzun süre sınırlı kaldığı ve sayıca az olduğu ancak son yıllarda bu alandaki araştırmaların belirgin bir artış gösterdiği sonucuna ulaştık. Bu araştırmaların ivme kazanmasına yönelik çözüm önerilerinde bulunarak İbâziyye ile ilgili çalışmaların daha ileri bir noktaya taşınmasının gerekliliğini ortaya koyduk. (shrink)

Dans un monde qui a commencé à prendre feu, la stratégie à adopter se pose à présent comme une question vitale. Il n'y a plus le droit à l'erreur, chaque échec stratégique peut coûter extrêmement cher. En nous rappelant de grandes victoires de l'histoire des luttes non-violentes, mais aussi des campagnes plus récentes comme celles des 'Décrocheurs de portraits' ou des 'grèves scolaires pour le climat,' l'auteur nous invite à cesser d'être spectateur et à devenir acteur de l'histoire. Comment agir (...) face à l'urgence climatique et à l'inaction de nos dirigeants? Avec quelles méthodes? Comment lutter efficacement contre le capitalisme et provoquer des changements culturels de grande ampleur? Comment résister à la répression? La Bataille du siècle--véritable manuel d'action civique et politique--propose des stratégies d'action concrètes pour faire émerger un mouvement citoyen de masse: désobéissance civile, non-violence radicale, convergence des luttes climatiques et sociales, complémentarité des alternatives et des résistances, réconciliation du local et du global... Jon Palais nous appelle à transformer la sidération en espérance, car, il en est convaincu, un autre monde est possible.."--Page 4 of cover. (shrink)

" L'homme a beau s'étendre autant qu'il peut par sa connaissance, a écrit Nietzsche ; il a beau s'apparaître aussi objectivement qu'il le veut ; il n'en retire cependant pour finir que sa propre biographie. " S'il appartient au biographe d'éclairer, voire d'" expliquer " l'œuvre par l'homme, peu d'écrivains ou de philosophes justifient autant que Nietzsche cette ambition et cette méthode. Car il en est peu, comme le montre Daniel Halévy, chez qui l'œuvre adhère aussi étroitement à la biographie (...) intérieure. A cet égard, l'ouvrage que Daniel Halévy consacra au philosophe du Gai Savoir, voici déjà un demi-siècle, reste un modèle du genre. Et, à l'heure où l'on célèbre le centenaire de la mort de Nietzsche, il s'ira pose comme un classique indispensable à la compréhension d'une œuvre trop souvent dénaturée par ses interprètes. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Borges on Language and TranslationJon StewartAlthough Jorge Luis Borges had years of philosophical training and expressed a number of philosophical theories in his literary works, he never published a philosophy treatise. The result is that his oeuvre has often been viewed as purely literary and been largely neglected by trained philosophers. However, by ignoring the philosophical aspects of Borges’s thought, criticism has neglected a vast dimension of his work (...) and has thus frequently misunderstood and misinterpreted many aspects of it. As I have tried to demonstrate in an earlier article, 1 there are important philosophical themes in the short stories of Borges, which have yet to be considered. In the present essay, I take up one of these heretofore neglected themes.We can find perhaps no better example of the literary exposition of Borges’s philosophical ideas than in his short story or cuento, “Averroes’ Search.” 2 There Borges reconstructs for us a culture and an age radically different and temporally distant from our own. He recounts the story of Averroes, the Arab philosopher living in Spain in the second half of the twelfth century. The history of philosophy knows Averroes as one of the great medieval commentators on the works of Aristotle. Borges recreates the historical moment and the passion of Averroes in his task of translating and providing a commentary for the texts of the great Greek philosopher who remains forever distant from him. The story takes as its point of departure Renan’s observation about a curious misinterpretation of Aristotle found in Averroes: “S’imaginant que la tragédie n’est autre chose que l’art de louer...”(p. 180). Borges poses [End Page 320] the question of why Averroes, who had dedicated his life to understanding the work of Aristotle, had so badly misunderstood the concept of tragedy treated by the Greek philosopher. To answer this question, Borges brilliantly employs the faculty of historical imagination in order to think himself back into Averroes’s particular time period and cultural context. The short story presents us with a thesis about the intimate connection between culture and language and the ultimate futility of translation and crosscultural knowledge and comprehension. In the present essay, I wish to argue that the point of Borges’s story about the fate of Averroes is (1) to refute the common view which sees language as an entity neutral with respect to culture and history, and (2) to bring to light the comprehensive nature and scope of particular culturally and historically determined ways of thinking and perceiving the world. These philosophical elements have been neglected by the various literary scholars who have treated the works of Borges. 3 Moreover, Borges anticipates many of the most celebrated epistemological and hermeneutical theories of our day from philosophers such as Gadamer, Davidson and Quine, and presents them in literary form.IThere is a common view according to which the manifold languages of the various peoples and cultures of the world are more or less interchangeable. According to this linguistics of common sense, language is something secondary and accidental which is only an inessential corollary to our basic understanding and perception of the world. Human perception and cognition are thought of as constants for all humans everywhere. A dog will be perceived as a dog regardless of time period, place or culture, and the words we create to represent “dog” in the medium of language are secondary and even arbitrary. As a result, individual words in one language correspond to individual words in another. Dog in English corresponds straightforwardly to Hund in German or perro in Spanish, and nothing could be more simple. The gifted translator is merely someone with a great capacity to memorize words and to effect rapid replacement changes, and translation is regarded as a more or less mechanical process with little room for creativity. The diversity of languages is neither epistemologically necessary nor important, but rather explained as an historical accident as in the etiological tale of the Tower of Babel. Language has no necessary connection to the time period in which it is spoken or to the culture of [End Page 321] the people who speak it. That we... (shrink)

O'Regan & Noë (O&N) fail to address adequately the two most historically important reasons for seeking to explain visual experience in terms of internal representations. They are silent about the apparently inferential nature of perception, and mistaken about the significance of the phenomenology accompanying dreams, hallucinations, and mental imagery.

" L'allure du temps a tout à fait changé, disait déjà Michelet en 1872. Il a doublé le pas d'une manière étrange. Dans une simple vie d'homme, j'ai vu deux grandes révolutions, qui autrefois auraient peut-être mis entre elles deux mille ans d'intervalle. " Daniel Halévy, historien, philosophe, biographe, avait vu beaucoup plus de choses encore, et plus extraordinaires, et en beaucoup moins de temps, quand il écrivit ce livre au lendemain de la Seconde Guerre mondiale. L'Histoire va-t-elle plus vite? (...) Etudiant le rythme des grands courants qui ont animé les empires et les peuples, l'auteur croit discerner dans son déroulement une allure constamment plus rapide. Cette thèse, qui soulève bien des interrogations et des objections, eut à l'époque un grand retentissement. Elle n'a rien perdu de son actualité. Le progrès technique en est-il la cause? Fait-il courir à l'humanité autant de dangers qu'il lui apporte de satisfactions? Ce court essai, un des plus denses et des plus riches qui aient été écrits sur la question, contient aussi un panorama fulgurant et passionné de l'Histoire universelle. On pourra lire à la suite quelques-uns des commentaires et des débats auxquels il a donné lieu, notamment une discussion avec Albert Bayet, le père Daniélou, et Raymond Aron, ainsi qu'une réflexion de Daniel Halévy sur Leibniz, le philosophe auquel il a consacré le plus d'attention. (shrink)

In this paper, we discuss some rather puzzling facts concerning the semantics of Warlpiri expressions of cardinality, i.e. the Warlpiri counterparts of English expressions like one,two, many, how many. The morphosyntactic evidence, discussed in section 1, suggests that the corresponding expressions in Warlpiri are nominal, just like the Warlpiri counterparts of prototypical nouns, eg. child. We also argue that Warlpiri has no articles or any other items of the syntactic category D(eterminer). In section 2, we describe three types of readings— (...) "definite", "indefinite" and "predicative"—which are generally found with Warlpiri nouns, including those which correspond to English common nouns and cardinality expressions. A partial analysis of these readings is sketched i n section 3. Since Warlpiri has no determiner system, we hypothesize that the source of (in)definiteness in this language is semantic. More specifically, we suggest that Warlpiri nominals are basically interpreted as individual terms or predicates of individuals and that their three readings arise as a consequence of the interaction of their basic meanings, which are specific to Warlpiri, with certain semantic operations, such as type shifting (Rooth and Partee 1982, Partee and Rooth 1983, Partee 1986, 1987), which universally can or must apply in the process of compositional semantic interpretation. (shrink)

In V. N. Huynh (ed.): Interval / Probabilistic Uncertainty and Non-Classical Logics, Advances in Soft Computing Series, Springer 2008, pp. 268-279. This paper proposes a common framework for various probabilistic logics. It consists of a set of uncertain premises with probabilities attached to them. This raises the question of the strength of a conclusion, but without imposing a particular semantics, no general solution is possible. The paper discusses several possible semantics by looking at it from the perspective of probabilistic argumentation.

Avicenna holds that since God has existed from all eternity and is immutable and impassible, he cannot come to have an attribute or feature that he has not had from all eternity. He also claims for the simultaneous causation. A puzzle arises when we consider God’s creating this world. If God is immutable and impassible, then his attributes associated with his creating this world are unchanging. So, God must have been creating the world from all eternity. But then God’s creative (...) act, one might object, seems to be no different from a matter of natural necessity. This is a threat to divine freedom, for God would then have no choice concerning his creative action. Anthony Ruffus and Jon McGinnis argue that this puzzle can be solved in such a way that Avicenna can consistently affirm divine freedom along with divine simplicity. They suggest that Naṣīr al-Dīn Ṭūsī’s interpretation might help to show that it is false that Avicenna’s God cannot choose absolutely. For it is still open to him to choose either to create eternally or to refrain from creating anything at all. Ruffus and McGinnis argue that since creating or not creating anything at all do not correspond to two distinct concepts, Avicenna’s account of divine simplicity, which denies any multiplicity in divine mind, is safeguarded along with divine freedom. I claim that God’s omnirationality requiring that he always acts for reasons is a serious threat to such an interpretation. (shrink)

Şiddet varoluşumuzun temelini oluşturan en önemli niteliklerdendir. Fransız düşünce tarihinde önemli bir yer tutan Walter Benjamin’in tarih kavramı üzerinden ele aldığı şiddet insanın doğal yaşamdan yerleşik yaşama, hukukun egemenliği altına girmesini temellendirmektedir. Ancak yasa, aynı zamanda egemenin tasavvurundadır. Bu nedenle zamanla yozlaşmaya açıktır. Benjamin bu yozlaşmanın bir karşı çıkışla, Mesiyanik bir şiddetle sona ereceğini ifade etmektedir. Hukuksal şiddet insanları tek tip kılarken, Mesiyanik şiddet daha kişisel bir formdadır. Benjamin’e göre burada yasa koyucu ve yasa koruyucu şiddetin uygulandığı insan kırılma anlarında (...) kendini bulmaktadır. Bu ifadeden yola çıkarak metinde Benjamin’in tarihin yıkıntıları arasında koşturduğunu söylediği çocuğa istinaden çocuksu bir şiddet formunu oluşturmak ve bunu temellendirmek metnin esas amacıdır. Bu çocuksu biçim, içkin şiddet olarak kavramsallaştırılmakta ve kişinin sorgulama ve itirazla kendi benliğini oluşturmasını temellendirmektedir. Böyle bir insan zaman ve mekanda kesinti yaratarak, toplumda kendini ortaya koyduğu yeni bir alan açmaktadır. Çocuksu içkin şiddet anın durduğu, zamanın askıya alındığı ve yasanın içinde bir gedik açılan ana denk gelmektedir. Bu fotoğrafla benzer bir etkiye sahiptir. Fotoğraf sanatı toplum ve yasanın içinde ve dışında, görülen ve görülmeyenin arasında bir yerdedir. Çocuksu içkin şiddeti uygulayan insan da diğerlerine göre barbar ve yabancı hale gelerek ne içeride ne dışarıda bulunmaktadır. Kısaca bütün akışı askıya almaktadır. Metinde bu durumu örneklemek için Ori Gerscht’in yıkımı konu alan fotoğrafları kullanılacaktır. (shrink)

İslam’ın temel kaynakları olan Kur’an ve sünnet, bazen bir takım kişi ve gruplar tarafından ulaşmak istedikleri amaç ve gayeler doğrultusunda kullanılmaktadır. Bununla beraber bu iki kaynak bazı kişiler tarafından zamanla insanları etkilemek veya saflarına çekmek arzusuyla rüya, ilham, keşif, keramet ve bazı yayınlarla işlevsiz hale getirilmektedir. Bu yöntemi, bilinen büyük yapılardan ayrı bazı marjinal tiplemeler de kullanmaktadır. Bunlardan insanlığın kurtuluşu için kendilerini birer ruhanî otorite olarak kabul eden Adnan Oktar, Serdar Çiftçi, İskender Evrenesoğlu ve benzerleri, dini bilgiyi aktarmada subjektif (...) tecrübeleri dinin birer kaynağı olarak görmektedirler. Aynı zamanda kendilerini huzurun kaynağı olarak göstermektedirler. Halbuki tarih boyu bu iddialarda bulunan yüzlerce kişi gelip geçmesine rağmen, onların dedikleri huzur ortamı oluşmadı aksine bunların kendileri huzursuzluğun sebebi oldular. Şu an bile çalışmamızda isimlerini belirttiğimiz kişiler, onlarca mağdur aile oluşturmuş olup hukuki soruşturmaları devam etmektedir. Nihayetinde bu tiplemeler İslam alemine birlik ve huzur yerine tefrika ve buhranlı yaşam sunmaktadırlar. Çalışmamızda gün geçtikçe sayıları katlanan bazı marjinal mehdî tiplemelerini ve söylemlerini analiz etmeye çalışacağız. (shrink)

The maximum entropy principle is widely used to determine non-committal probabilities on a finite domain, subject to a set of constraints, but its application to continuous domains is notoriously problematic. This paper concerns an intermediate case, where the domain is a first-order predicate language. Two strategies have been put forward for applying the maximum entropy principle on such a domain: applying it to finite sublanguages and taking the pointwise limit of the resulting probabilities as the size n of the sublanguage (...) increases; selecting a probability function on the language as a whole whose entropy on finite sublanguages of size n is not dominated by that of any other probability function for sufficiently large n. The entropy-limit conjecture says that, where these two approaches yield determinate probabilities, the two methods yield the same probabilities. If this conjecture is found to be true, it would provide a boost to the project of seeking a single canonical inductive logic—a project which faltered when Carnap's attempts in this direction succeeded only in determining a continuum of inductive methods. The truth of the conjecture would also boost the project of providing a canonical characterisation of normal or default models of first-order theories. Hitherto, the entropy-limit conjecture has been verified for languages which contain only unary predicate symbols and also for the case in which the constraints can be captured by a categorical statement of quantifier complexity. This paper shows that the entropy-limit conjecture also holds for categorical statements of complexity, for various non-categorical constraints, and in certain other general situations. (shrink)