In der Reihe werden herausragende monographische Untersuchungen und Sammelbände zu allen Aspekten der Philosophie Kants veröffentlicht, ebenso zum systematischen Verhältnis seiner Philosophie zu anderen philosophischen Ansätzen in Geschichte und Gegenwart. Veröffentlicht werden Studien, die einen innovativen Charakter haben und ausdrückliche Desiderate der Forschung erfüllen. Die Publikationen repräsentieren damit den aktuellsten Stand der Forschung.

This book pieces together the jigsaw puzzle of Einstein's journey to discovering the special theory of relativity. Between 1902 and 1905, Einstein sat in the Patent Office and may have made calculations on old pieces of paper that were once patent drafts. One can imagine Einstein trying to hide from his boss, writing notes on small sheets of paper, and, according to reports, seeing to it that the small sheets of paper on which he was writing would vanish into his (...) desk-drawer as soon as he heard footsteps approaching his door. He probably discarded many pieces of papers and calculations and flung them in the waste paper basket in the Patent Office. The end result was that Einstein published nothing regarding the special theory of relativity prior to 1905. For many years before 1905, he had been intensely concerned with the topic; in fact, he was busily working on the problem for seven or eight years prior to 1905. Unfortunately, there are no surviving notebooks and manuscripts, no notes and papers or other primary sources from this critical period to provide any information about the crucial steps that led Einstein to his great discovery. In May 1905, Henri Poincare sent three letters to Hendrik Lorentz at the same time that Einstein wrote his famous May 1905 letter to Conrad Habicht, promising him four works, of which the fourth one, Relativity, was a rough draft at that point. In the May 1905 letters to Lorentz, Poincare presented the basic equations of his 1905 "Dynamics of the Electron", meaning that, at this point, Poincare and Einstein both had drafts of papers relating to the principle of relativity. The book discusses Einstein's and Poincare's creativity and the process by which their ideas developed. The book also explores the misunderstandings and paradoxes apparent in the theory of relativity, and unravels the subtleties and creativity of Einstein. (shrink)

The relationship between Albert Einstein’s special theory of relativity and Hendrik A. Lorentz’s ether theory is best understood in terms of competing interpretations of Lorentz invariance. In the 1890s, Lorentz proved and exploited the Lorentz invariance of Maxwell’s equations, the laws governing electromagnetic fields in the ether, with what he called the theorem of corresponding states. To account for the negative results of attempts to detect the earth’s motion through the ether, Lorentz, in effect, had to assume that (...) the laws governing the matter interacting with the fields are Lorentz invariant as well. This additional assumption can be seen as a generalization of the well-known contraction hypothesis. In Lorentz’s theory, it remained an unexplained coincidence that both the laws governing fields and the laws governing matter should be Lorentz invariant. In special relativity, by contrast, the Lorentz invariance of all physical laws directly reflects the Minkowski space-time structure posited by the theory. One can use this observation to produce a common-cause argument to show that the relativistic interpretation of Lorentz invariance is preferable to Lorentz’s interpretation. (shrink)

Here the philosopher and physicist David Z Albert argues, among other things, that the difference between past and future can be understood as a mechanical phenomenon of nature and that quantum mechanics makes it impossible to present the entirety of what can be said about the world as a narrative of “befores” and “afters.”.

This essay focuses on how casuistry can become a useful technique of practical reasoning for the clinical ethicist or ethics consultant. Casuistry is defined, its relationship to rhetorical reasoning and its interpretation of cases, by employing three terms that, while they are not employed by the classical rhetoricians and casuists, conform, in a general way, to the features of their work. Those terms are (1) morphology, (2) taxonomy, (3) kinetics. The morphology of a case reveals the invariant structure of the (...) particular case whatever its contingent features, and also the invariant forms of argument relevant to any case of the same sort: these invariant features can be called topics. Taxonomy situates the instant case in a series of similar cases, allowing the similarities and differences between an instant case and a paradigm case to dictate the moral judgment about the instant case. This judgment is based, not merely on application of an ethical theory or principle, but upon the way in which circumstances and maxims appear in the morphology of the case itself and in comparison with other cases. Kinetics is an understanding of the way in which one case imparts a kind of moral movement to other cases, that is, different and sometimes unprecedented circumstances may move certain marginal or exceptional cases to the level of paradigm cases. In conclusion, casuistry is the exercise of prudential or practical reasoning in recognition of the relationship between maxims, circumstances and topics, as well as the relationship of paradigms to analogous cases. (shrink)

Two leaves of typescript and 7 leaves of galley proofs with corrections in Einstein's hand for the article "Relativity" in American Peoples Encyclopedia.

E. J. Lowe offers an account of modal knowledge that involves two primary theses. First, the basis of modal knowledge is essential knowledge, and the source of essential knowledge is grasp of essence. Second, all empirical knowledge ultimately depends on some modal knowledge. This article assesses Lowe’s account and defends four conclusions. First, there is a tension in Lowe’s account of grasp of essence; it wavers between an undemanding version, which holds that grasp of essence requires no more than our (...) ordinary understanding of propositions, and a more demanding version, which holds that it requires rational insight into necessary relationships between essences. Second, both versions face serious challenges. Third, Lowe’s account of knowledge of essence does not provide a basis for modal knowledge. Fourth, Lowe’s supporting argument for his second thesis contains two significant gaps and the principles necessary to close the gaps reveal further tensions in his epistemological views. (shrink)

A inicios del siglo XX, Albert Einstein y Hendrik Lorentz produjeron explicaciones diferentes acerca de los mismos fenómenos. Sin embargo, rápidamente se produjo un consenso, en favor de Einstein, que ha sido difícil de comprender para historiadores y filósofos de la ciencia. La literatura reciente explica ese éxito señalando conflictos entre algunas ideas de Lorentz y la temprana física cuántica. Sin negar que esos factores pudieron contribuir en la aceptación de la relatividad especial, propongo una explicación complementaria en (...) la que atribuyo el éxito de Einstein al uso de la estabilidad de la medición de la velocidad de la luz. (shrink)

Non-invasive brain stimulation promises innovative experimental possibilities for psychology and neurosci- ence as well as new therapeutic and palliative measures in medicine. Because of its good risk–benefit ratio, non-invasiveness and reversibility as well as its low effort and cost it has good chances of becoming a wide- spread tool in science, medicine and even in lay use. While most issues in medical and research ethics such as informed consent, safety, and potential for misuse can be handled with manageable effort, the (...) real promise of brain stimulation does raise one prominent moral worry: it may lay the foundation of reliable, precise and stable manipulations of the mind. This article addresses this worry and concludes that it is not the possibility of manipulation, but the shift in our understanding of our mind which stands in need of careful consideration. (shrink)

Engineering the Climate: The Ethics of Solar Radiation Management is a wide-ranging and expert analysis of the ethics of the intentional management of solar radiation. This book will be a useful tool for policy-makers, a provocation for ethicists, and an eye-opening analysis for both the scientist and the general reader with interest in climate change.

The economic distinction between technological and market information offers a useful guide to the relationship between information and policy. The two types create different problems for markets and require different emphases in public policy, focusing on either the production or the distribution of information. The interaction of the two types creates familiar policy problems such as underinvestment in information, adverse selection and moral hazard. Indicators and other means of dealing with such problems constitute policies and demonstrate not only the importance (...) of information for policy but the necessity of policy for information. (shrink)

We argue that thinking of the man-machine comparison in terms of a contest involves, in a reasonable scenario, a criterion of success that is neutral. This is because we want to avoid a petitio principii. We submit, however, that, by looking at things this way, one makes the most essential human things invisible. Thus, in a sense, the contest approach is self-defeating.

By turns historical, sociological and autobiographical, this book investigates racism as social pathology - a cultural disease that prevails because it allows one segment of society to empower itself at the expense of another.

Bell’s Theorem from Physics 36:1–28 (1964) and the (Strong) Free Will Theorem of Conway and Kochen from Notices AMS 56:226–232 (2009) both exclude deterministic hidden variable theories (or, in modern parlance, ‘ontological models’) that are compatible with some small fragment of quantum mechanics, admit ‘free’ settings of the archetypal Alice and Bob experiment, and satisfy a locality condition akin to parameter independence. We clarify the relationship between these theorems by giving reformulations of both that exactly pinpoint their resemblance and their (...) differences. Our reformulation imposes determinism in what we see as the only consistent way, in which the ‘ontological state’ initially determines both the settings and the outcome of the experiment. The usual status of the settings as ‘free’ parameters is subsequently recovered from independence assumptions on the pertinent (random) variables. Our reformulation also clarifies the role of the settings in Bell’s later generalization of his theorem to stochastic hidden variable theories. (shrink)

Geraud de Cordemoy, 1600-1684 -- Clerselier, 1614-1684, and Rohault, 1620-1675 -- Louis de la Chambre, 1594-1669 -- Samuel Sorbière, 1615-1670 -- Louis de la Forge and the critique of substantial forms -- Cartesian doctrine and the animal soul -- Clauberg and the development of occasionalism -- Some historical steps towards parallelism -- Cartesian refutations of Spinoza -- Matter and scientific efficiency -- Man, Thomistic and Cartesian.

We propose a technical reformulation of the measurement problem of quantum mechanics, which is based on the postulate that the final state of a measurement is classical; this accords with experimental practice as well as with Bohr’s views. Unlike the usual formulation (in which the post-measurement state is a unit vector in Hilbert space), our version actually opens the possibility of admitting a purely technical solution within the confines of conventional quantum theory (as opposed to solutions that either modify this (...) theory, or introduce unusual and controversial interpretative rules and/or ontologies). To that effect, we recall a remarkable phenomenon in the theory of Schrödinger operators (discovered in 1981 by Jona-Lasinio, Martinelli, and Scoppola), according to which the ground state of a symmetric double-well Hamiltonian (which is paradigmatically of Schrödinger’s Cat type) becomes exponentially sensitive to tiny perturbations of the potential as ħ→0. We show that this instability emerges also from the textbook wkb approximation, extend it to time-dependent perturbations, and study the dynamical transition from the ground state of the double well to the perturbed ground state (in which the cat is typically either dead or alive, depending on the details of the perturbation). Numerical simulations show that adiabatically arising perturbations may (quite literally) cause the collapse of the wave-function in the classical limit. Thus, at least in the context of a simple mathematical model, we combine the technical and conceptual virtues of decoherence (which fails to solve the measurement problem but launches the key idea that perturbations may come from the environment) with those of dynamical collapse models à la grw (which do solve the measurement problem but are ad hoc), without sharing their drawbacks: single measurement outcomes are obtained (instead of merely diagonal reduced density matrices), and no modification of quantum mechanics is needed. (shrink)

Because they involve individual-level cognitive processes, psychological explanations of linguistic phenomena are in principle testable against individual behaviour. The present study draws on patterns of individual variation in corpus data to test explanations of productivity. Linguistic patterns are predicted to become more productive with higher type frequencies and lower token frequencies. This is because the formation of abstract mental representations is encouraged by varied types but counteracted by automation of high-frequency types. The predictions are tested for English -ly and -ness-derivation, (...) as used by 698 individual journalists in the New York Times Annotated Corpus and 171 members of Parliament in the Hansard Corpus. Linear regression is used to model individual variation in productivity, in relation to type and token frequency, as well as several other predictor variables. While the expected effects are observed, there is also robust evidence of an interaction effect between type and token frequency, indicating that productivity is highest for patterns with many types and not-too-infrequent tokens. This fits best with a view of entrenchment as both a conservative and creative force in language. Further, some variation remains irreducibly individual and is not explained by currently known predictors of productivity. (shrink)

In standard Albanian studies and Western scholarship, including either any interested religious and political activism or less 'interested' lay people, endeavours of historical and textual fact-finding have been relevant for only to re-confirm and indeed perpetuate the very meaning of a myth, according to which the thinking of Naim Frasheri was formed and dominated by Bektashism and that his 'Albanianism' had a Bektashi foundation. In this paper I intend to scrutinize and disprove this, arguing that while Frasheri did indeed have (...) a religious cast of thought, his religious thinking went far beyond Bektashism in its heterodoxy, being a kind of liberation theology and pantheism which generated an all-inclusive attitude to Albanian identity, not one limited in any special way to Bektashism. Methodologically, such a picture must arise if we submit the available empirical evidence to critical analysis from the perspective of social theoretical approaches to religion developed in sociology and anthropology. (shrink)

Situé au carrefour des études culturelles et visuelles (cultural and visual studies), de l’histoire matérielle (material history), de l’histoire du livre et de l’édition, et de la littérature, l’ouvrage publié sous la direction de Ann R. Hawkins et Maura Ives (toutes deux dix-neuvièmistes, spécialistes à la fois de la bibliographie et des women’s studies) regroupe douze études savantes qui brossent un large panorama de la situation littéraire, sociale et symbolique des écrivaines de langue an...

Poppers Logik der Forschung steht für eine erhebliche Problemverschiebung in der Wissenschaftstheorie, von der Logik der Forschung zur Verfassung der Wissenschaft. Popper sieht die Methodologie als eine Institution, als ein Regelsystem für die Akzeptanz oder Verwerfung von Theorien und Beobachtungsaussagen. Dieser immer noch wenig beachtete institutionelle Aspekt von Poppers kritischem Rationalismus ist zum einen für die Interpretation der methodologischen Regeln von Bedeutung. Zum anderen wirft er ein neues Problem auf: Kann sich eine solche Methodologie als Verfassung der Wissenschaft etablieren? Eine (...) institutionenökonomische Analyse des wissenschaftlichen Wettbewerbs zeigt, dass eine notwendige Bedingung dafür erfüllt ist: die Methodologie des kritischen Rationalismus ist anreizkompatibel, das heißt, es liegt im Interesse eines Forschers, diese Methodologie zu beachten, wenn er erwartet, dass die anderen Forscher ebenso verfahren. (shrink)