The founder of modern linguistics, Ferdinand de Saussure inaugurated semiology, structuralism, and deconstruction and made possible the work of Jacques Derrida, Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Lacan, thus enabling the development of French feminism, gender studies, New Historicism, and postcolonialism. Based on Saussure's lectures, _Course in General Linguistics_ traces the rise and fall of the historical linguistics in which Saussure was trained, the synchronic or structural linguistics with which he replaced it, and the new look of diachronic linguistics that (...) followed this change. Most important, Saussure presents the principles of a new linguistic science that includes the invention of semiology, or the theory of the "signifier," the "signified," and the "sign" that they combine to produce. This is the first critical edition of _Course in General Linguistics_ to appear in English and restores Wade Baskin's original translation of 1959, in which the terms "signifier" and "signified" are introduced into English in this precise way. Baskin renders Saussure clearly and accessibly, allowing readers to experience his shift of the theory of reference from mimesis to performance and his expansion of poetics to include all media, including the life sciences and environmentalism. An introduction situates Saussure within the history of ideas and describes the history of scholarship that made _Course in General Linguistics_ legendary. New endnotes enlarge Saussure's contexts to include literary criticism, cultural studies, and philosophy. (shrink)

Tamar Meisels responds to the preceding article.

We discuss a recent proposal by Albert (1994a; 1994b; 2000, ch. 7) to recover thermodynamics on a purely dynamical basis, using the quantum theory of the collapse of the wave function by Ghirardi, Rimini, and Weber (1986). We propose an alternative way to explain thermodynamics within no-collapse interpretations of quantum mechanics. Our approach relies on the standard quantum mechanical models of environmental decoherence of open systems (e.g., Joos and Zeh 1985; Zurek and Paz 1994). This paper presents the two approaches (...) and discusses their advantages. The problems faced by both approaches will be discussed in a sequel (Hemmo and Shenker 2003). (shrink)

This essay sets out from the strain of liberal political thought which, in recent years, has come to the defence of nationalism, and raises some preliminary thoughts concerning its appropriate application to the very concrete issue of national territorial rights. It asks what type of justifications could be morally acceptable to “liberal nationalism” for the acquisition and holding of territory. To this end, the paper takes a brief look at five central arguments for territorial entitlement which have become predominant in (...) political debates. These are: so called “historical rights” to territory; demands for territorial restitution; efficiency arguments; claims of entitlement to territories settled by co‐nationals; and lastly, territorial demands based on claims of equal entitlement to the earth's natural resources. These popular arguments point towards several potential criteria for the arbitration of territorial conflicts. The paper attempts to outline the morally relevant guidelines for thinking about territorial issues that flow from, or are at least consistent with, applying liberal values to the national phenomenon. It places the territorial aspect of nationalism at the head of the liberal nationalist agenda and offers an initial common ground for discussion among liberals, and for the mediation of claims between nations. (shrink)

Liberal defences of nationalism have become prevalent since the mid-1980 s. Curiously, they have largely neglected the fact that nationalism is primarily about land. Should liberals throw up their hands in despair when confronting conflicting claims stemming from incommensurable national narratives and holy texts? Should they dismiss conflicting demands that stem solely from particular cultures, religions and mythologies in favour of a supposedly neutral set of guidelines? Does history matter? Should ancient injustices interest us today? Should we care who reached (...) the territory first and who were its prior inhabitants? Should principles of utility play a part in resolving territorial disputes? Was John Locke right to argue that the utilisation of land counts in favour of its acquisition? And should Western style settlement projects work in favour or against a nation s territorial demands? When and how should principles of equality and equal distribution come into play? Territorial Rights examines the generic types of territorial claims customarily put forward by national groups as justification for their territorial demands, within the framework of what has come to be known as liberal nationalism . The final outcome is a multifarious theory on the ethics of territorial boundaries that supplies a workable set of guidelines for evaluating territorial disputes from a liberal-national perspective, and offers a common ground for discussion (including disagreement) and for the mediation of claims. (shrink)

The operation of developing a concept is a common procedure in mathematics and in natural science, but has traditionally seemed much less possible to philosophers and, especially, logicians. Meir Buzaglo's innovative study proposes a way of expanding logic to include the stretching of concepts, while modifying the principles which block this possibility. He offers stimulating discussions of the idea of conceptual expansion as a normative process, and of the relation of conceptual expansion to truth, meaning, reference, ontology and paradox, (...) and analyzes the views of Kant, Wittgenstein, Godel, and others, paying especially close attention to Frege. His book will be of interest to a wide range of readers, from philosophers to logicians, mathematicians, linguists, and cognitive scientists. (shrink)

The legal consensus that has evolved through adjudication and legislation since the Karen Quinlan case in 1976 is founded on the premise that there is a bright line between passive euthanasia and active euthanasia. Indeed, the term passive euthanasia is often eschewed in favor of less emotionally-laden terminology such as "forgoing life-sustaining treatment" or "terminating life support" so as to further sever any possible connection with active euthanasia. Legal approval has been bestowed upon passive euthanasia under certain circumstances while active (...) euthanasia is routinely condemned. This consensus was put to a test in 1990 when the United States Supreme Court ruled on the Cruzan case. However, the Court's narrow decision did not upset the consensus, and in the most significant appellate decisions handed down by state courts since Cruzan, there has been a reaffirmation-and possibly even an extension-of the consensus. Two other threats to the legal consensus about forgoing life-sustaining treatment have begun to manifest themselves: the increasing pressure for mercy killing and "futility" cases. Both of these challenge the fundamental premises on which the consensus is grounded. (shrink)

Known terrorists are often targeted for death by the governments of Israel and the United States. Several thousand have been killed by drones or by operatives on the ground in the last twenty years. Is this form of killing justified? Is there anything about it that should disturb us? In this for-and-against book, political theorists Jeremy Waldron and Tamar Meisels engage in extended debate to illuminate these issues. They consider the actions of targeting and hunting down named individuals, and they (...) address concerns about the possibility of this practice getting out of hand and being extended beyond the realm of counter-terrorism. (shrink)

We present a novel reductive theory of type-identity physicalism, which is inspired by the foundations of statistical mechanics as a general theory of natural kinds. We show that all the claims mounted against type-identity physicalism in the literature don’t apply to Flat Physicalism, and moreover that this reductive theory solves many of the problems faced by the various non-reductive approaches including functionalism. In particular, we show that Flat Physicalism can account for the appearance of multiple realizability in the special sciences, (...) and that it gives a novel account of the genuine autonomy of the kinds and laws in the special sciences. We further show that the thesis of genuine multiple realization, which is compatible with all forms of non-reductive approaches including functionalism, implies what we call token-dualism; namely the idea that in every token there are non-physical facts, which may either be non-physical properties or some non-physical substance. In other words, we prove that non-reductive kinds necessarily assume non-reductive tokens, i.e., token dualism. Finally, we show that all forms of non-reductive approaches including functionalism imply a literally multi-leveled structure of reality. (shrink)

This paper proves that Maxwell's Demon is compatible with classical mechanics. In particular it shows how the cycle of operation - including measurement and erasure - can be carried out with no entropy cost, contrary to the Landauer-Bennett thesis (according to which memory erasure costs kln2 of entropy increase per bit). The Landauer-Bennet thesis is thus proven to be mistaken.

Sex chromosomes can differ between species as a result of evolutionary turnover, a process that can be driven by evolution of the sex determination pathway. Canonical models of sex chromosome turnover hypothesize that a new master sex determining gene causes an autosome to become a sex chromosome or an XY chromosome pair to switch to a ZW pair (or vice versa). Here, a novel paradigm for the evolution of sex determination and sex chromosomes is presented, in which there is an (...) evolutionary transition in the master sex determiner, but the X chromosome remains unchanged. There are three documented examples of the novel paradigm, and it is hypothesized that a similar process could happen in a ZW sex chromosome system. Three other taxa are also identified where the novel paradigm may have occurred, and how it could be distinguished from canonical trajectories in these and additional taxa is also described. (shrink)

We discuss the meaning of probabilities in the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics. We start by presenting very briefly the many worlds theory, how the problem of probability arises, and some unsuccessful attempts to solve it in the past. Then we criticize a recent attempt by Deutsch to derive the quantum mechanical probabilities from the nonprobabilistic parts of quantum mechanics and classical decision theory. We further argue that the Born probability does not make sense even as an additional probability (...) rule in the many worlds theory. Our conclusion is that the many worlds theory fails to account for the probabilistic statements of standard (collapse) quantum mechanics. (shrink)

The conduct of hostilities is very bad for the environment, yet relatively little attention has been focused on environmental military ethics by just war theorists and revisionist philosophers of war. Contemporary ecological concerns pose significant challenges to jus in bello. I begin by briefly surveying existing literature on environmental justice during wartime. While these jus in bello environmental issues have been addressed only sparsely by just war theorists, environmental jus ad bellum has rarely been tackled within JWT or the morality (...) of war. In line with the theme of this special issue, I focus my discussion of war and the natural environment primarily on the jus ad bellum level. I set out with the presumption against the use of force, and its possible exceptions. The principal question raised is whether environmental harm can trigger a new justification for war. Beyond just cause, I consider what might be a proportionate response to “environmental aggression,” or negligent harm to nature. The use of force is clearly justified in response to military attacks, against the natural environment or otherwise. Where harm to nature or its inhabitants are not caused by military aggression, just war theory criteria point in favor of responding via measures short of war. Finally, I suggest that responding by means that are not themselves harmful to nature serves to fulfill the further jus ad bellum criterion of “right intention.”. (shrink)

Can we explain the laws of thermodynamics, in particular the irreversible increase of entropy, from the underlying quantum mechanical dynamics? Attempts based on classical dynamics have all failed. Albert (1994a,b; 2000) proposed a way to recover thermodynamics on a purely dynamical basis, using the quantum theory of the collapse of the wavefunction of Ghirardi, Rimini and Weber (1986). In this paper we propose an alternative way to explain thermodynamics within no-collapse interpretations of quantum mechanics. Our approach relies on the standard (...) quantum mechanical models of environmental decoherence of open systems, e.g. Joos and Zeh (1985) and Zurek and Paz (1994). (shrink)

This paper reflects on the highly contested Israeli restrictions on the importation of civilian goods into the Gaza Strip, with reference to a wide range of principled questions within military ethics regarding sieges, sanctions and blockades. Beginning with Israel's unilateral withdrawal from the Gaza Strip and culminating in its recent easing of sanctions, the paper attempts to bring out the central issues of principle embedded in the political polemic: unilaterally terminated occupation; the responsibilities of a former, though recent, occupier; the (...) semantic distinction between siege and sanction and their respective ramifications; harm to civilians; necessity and proportionality. Overall, it argues in the specific case that Israel's restrictions on Gaza were not indefensible from the start as a first attempt to halt terrorism while avoiding full-scale conflict. In view of their ineffectiveness in achieving these goals, however, the harm they inflicted on civilians increasingly proved unnecessary and therefore excessive. There could then be no justification for continuing to restrict the flow of civilian goods into Gaza, as Israel itself eventually recognized. Nonetheless, Israel retains the right to search and regulate the passage of all relief supplies into Gaza, whether by land or by sea, as well as to secure its own borders for the safety of its citizens. (shrink)

This essay looks at the contemporary just war theory literature on preventive war that has emerged largely in reaction to the US invasion of Iraq. Recent sanctions on Iran and the debate over its nuclear program now suggest the usefulness of a forward looking perspective on preventive strikes, rather than the retroactive analyses offered thus far primarily with reference to Iraq. With Iran closely in mind, I address the various arguments for and against preventive war indicating throughout that the various (...) principled objections to early military action can be overcome in this case. Many of the crucial concrete questions regarding costs and benefits need to be settled in practice, rather than in the realm of political theory. Ultimately, the discussion suggests that Iran is a legitimate candidate for early military action aimed to prevent it from developing nuclear weapons. I argue that in principle, subject to credible intelligence information and requirements of proportionality, a unilateral Israeli strike against Iran will be justifiable, both morally and legally, as self-defense. (shrink)

The stories we tell in our attempt to make sense of the world, our myths and religion, literature and philosophy, science and art, are the comforting vehicles we use to transmit ideas of order. But beneath the quest for order lies the uneasy dread of fundamental disorder. True chaos is hard to imagine and even harder to represent, especially without some recourse to the familiar coherency of order. In this book, Martin Meisel considers the long effort to conjure, depict, and (...) rationalize extreme disorder, with all the passions, excitements, and compromises the act has provoked. In seven chapters--"Shaping Chaos," "Nothing and Something," "Number," "Carnival," "War," "Energy," and "Entropy"--Meisel builds a rough history from major social, psychological, and cosmological turning points in the imagining of chaos. He uses examples from literature, philosophy, painting, graphic art, science, linguistics, music, and film, particularly exploring the remarkable shift in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries from conceiving of chaos as disruptive to celebrating its liberating and energizing potential. Discussions of Sophocles, Plato, Lucretius, Calderon, Milton, Haydn, Blake, Faraday, Chekhov, Faulkner, Wells, and Beckett, among others, are matched with incisive readings of art by Brueghel, Rubens, Goya, Turner, Dix, Dada and the futurists. Meisel addresses the revolution in mapping energy and entropy and the manifold impact of thermodynamics. Known for his pathbreaking studies of literature, drama, and the visual arts, Meisel uses this chaotic frame to elaborate on larger concerns of purpose, mortality, meaning, and mind. (shrink)

Liberal defences of nationalism, prevalent since the mid-1980’s, have largely neglected the fact that nationalism is primarily about land. Territorial Rights examines the generic types of territorial claims customarily put forward by national groups as justification for their territorial demands, within the framework of what has come to be known as ‘liberal nationalism’.

An outline for a modal interpretation in terms of possible worlds is presented. The so-called Schmidt histories are taken to correspond to the physically possible worlds. The decoherence function defined in the histories formulation of quantum theory is taken to prescribe a non-classical probability measure over the set of the possible worlds. This is shown to yield dynamics in the form of transition probabilities for occurrent events in each world. The role of the consistency condition is discussed.

ABSTRACT In 1798, Thomas Robert Malthus’s infamous An Essay on the Principle of Population was published. The publication of the Essay is best remembered for Malthus’s principle – that population multiplies geometrically as opposed to subsistence increasing arithmetically. What is not well known, however, is that Malthus’s Essay also offered a sophisticated – and heterodox – theory of mind. Despite a recent revival in Malthusian scholarship, Malthus’s theory of mind has been largely forgotten. The present study attempts to address this (...) neglected area within the literature, by evaluating Malthus’s contribution to the naturalization of the soul. I first situate Malthus’s theory of mind within the Essay’s broader naturalization project, examining Malthus’s role as naturalist; his views on humans as animals; and the Essay’s cosmology. This is followed by an exploration of the making and reception of the Essay, illustrating how readers widely interpreted Malthus’s theory of mind as a theory of naturalization. Finally, I reconstruct Malthus’s naturalized system of mind, discussing the mechanisms and dynamics involved in the operation of a materialist mind. In sum, I argue for the centrality of Malthus’s Essay in the larger naturalization movement, specifically as it pertains to the soul. (shrink)

This paper describes a version of type identity physicalism, which we call Flat Physicalism, and shows how it meets several objections often raised against identity theories. This identity theory is informed by recent results in the conceptual foundations of physics, and in particular clar- ifies the notion of ‘physical kinds’ in light of a conceptual analysis of the paradigmatic case of reducing thermody- namics to statistical mechanics. We show how Flat Physi- calism is compatible with the appearance of multiple realisation (...) in the special sciences, and how and in what sense the special sciences laws are autonomous from the laws of physics, despite the full reductive picture of Flat Physicalism. We compare our view with a recent proposal by William Bechtel that accounts for the appearance of levels in mechanistic explanations. (shrink)

We argue that current constructive approaches to the special theory of relativity do not derive the geometrical Minkowski structure from the dynamics but rather assume it. We further argue that in current physics there can be no dynamical derivation of primitive geometrical notions such as length. By this we believe we continue an argument initiated by Einstein.

What is terrorism and can it ever be defended? Beginning with its definition, proceeding to its possible justifications, and culminating in proposals for contending with and combating it, this book offers a full theoretical analysis of the issue of terrorism. Tamar Meisels argues that, regardless of its professed cause, terrorism is diametrically opposed to the requirements of liberal morality and can only be defended at the expense of relinquishing the most basic of liberal commitments. Meisels opposes those who express sympathy (...) and justification for Islamist terrorism and terrorism allegedly carried out on behalf of developing nations, but, at the same time, also opposes those who would tolerate any reduction in civil liberties in exchange for greater security. Calling wholeheartedly for a unanimous liberal front against terrorism, this is a strong and provocative attempt to address the tension between liberty and security in a time of terror. (shrink)

In a previous article, we have demonstrated by a general phase space argument that a Maxwellian Demon is compatible with statistical mechanics. In this article, we show how this idea can be put to work in the prevalent model of the Demon, namely, a particle-in-a-box, used, for example, by Szilard and Bennett. In the literature, this model is used in order to show that a Demon is incompatible with statistical mechanics, either classical or quantum. However, we show that a detailed (...) phase space analysis of this model illustrates that a Maxwellian Demon is compatible with statistical mechanics. (shrink)

This paper concerns the meaning of the idea of typicality in classical statistical mechanics and how typicality is related to the notion of probability.

This paper makes a novel linkage between the multiple-computations theorem in philosophy of mind and Landauer’s principle in physics. The multiple-computations theorem implies that certain physical systems implement simultaneously more than one computation. Landauer’s principle implies that the physical implementation of “logically irreversible” functions is accompanied by minimal entropy increase. We show that the multiple-computations theorem is incompatible with, or at least challenges, the universal validity of Landauer’s principle. To this end we provide accounts of both ideas in terms of (...) low-level fundamental concepts in statistical mechanics, thus providing a deeper understanding of these ideas than their standard formulations given in the high-level terms of thermodynamics and cognitive science. Since Landauer’s principle is pivotal in the attempts to derive the universal validity of the second law of thermodynamics in statistical mechanics, our result entails that the multiple-computations theorem has crucial implications with respect to the second law. Finally, our analysis contributes to the understanding of notions, such as “logical irreversibility,” “entropy increase,” “implementing a computation,” in terms of fundamental physics, and to resolving open questions in the literature of both fields, such as: what could it possibly mean that a certain physical process implements a certain computation. (shrink)

According to influential views the probabilities in classical statistical mechanics and other special sciences are objective chances, although the underlying mechanical theory is deterministic, since the deterministic low level is inadmissible or unavailable from the high level. Here two intuitions pull in opposite directions: One intuition is that if the world is deterministic, probability can only express subjective ignorance. The other intuition is that probability of high-level phenomena, especially thermodynamic ones, is dictated by the state of affairs in the world. (...) We argue in support of this second intuition and we show that in fact there are two different ways in which high-level probability describes matters of fact, even if the underlying microscopic reality is deterministic. Our analysis is novel, but supports approaches by, e.g., Loewer, Albert, Frigg and Hoefer, List and Pivato. In particular, the reductive view we propose here can be seen as a naturalization of the above approaches. We consider consequences of our result for nonreductive physicalist approaches, such as functionalism, that admit multiple realization of the kinds that appear in the special sciences by physical kinds. We show that nonreductive physicalism implies the existence of nonphysical matters of fact. (shrink)

Special sciences (such as biology, psychology, economics) describe various regularities holding at some high macroscopic level. One of the central questions concerning these macroscopic regularities is how they are related to the laws of physics governing the underlying microscopic physical reality. In this paper we show how a macroscopic regularity may emerge from an underlying micro- scopic structure, and how the appearance of multiple realizability of the special sciences by physics comes about in a reductionist-physicalist framework. On this basis we (...) explain how complexity at the high level can arise due to a sort of harmony between the microscopic dynamics and observer-dependent macroscopic properties. We show that observer-dependent properties, which underlie the emergence of macroscopic properties and of macroscopic complexity, are objective physical facts. We argue that such physical properties remove the mystery from the multiple realizability of special sciences’ kinds, since the latter are grounded in shared physical properties. Finally we explain how and in what sense in our reductive physicalist approach the special sciences are still autonomous after all. (shrink)

We argue that certain types of many minds (and many worlds) interpretations of quantum mechanics, e.g. Lockwood ([1996a]), Deutsch ([1985]) do not provide a coherent interpretation of the quantum mechanical probabilistic algorithm. By contrast, in Albert and Loewer's ([1988]) version of the many minds interpretation, there is a coherent interpretation of the quantum mechanical probabilities. We consider Albert and Loewer's probability interpretation in the context of Bell-type and GHZ-type states and argue that it implies a certain (weak) form of nonlocality. (...) 1 Introduction 2 Albert and Loewer's interpretation 3 Probabilities in Lockwood's interpretation 4 Sets of minds and their correlations 5 Many minds and GHZ. (shrink)

Is freedom compatible with determinism? Davidson famously rephrased this question by replacing “freedom” with “anomaly of the mental”, that is, failure to fall under a law. In order to prove that the anomaly of the mental is compatible with other conjectures he makes, in particular that: there is psycho-physical causation; “where there is causality, there must be a law” ; and the mental supervenes on the physical, Davidson proposed a model, that came to be known as anomalous monism. Accepting all (...) of Davidson’s conjectures, we compare the structure of Davidson’s argument with that of Einstein’s argument for the special theory of relativity. This leads us to an exposition of Davidson’s ontology in terms that are inspired by recent results in the philosophy of physics, that is, in terms of fundamental ontology and high-level coarse-grained descriptions. We explain in what sense Davidson’s model is a principle theory and discuss some requirements that the constructive theory underlying Davidson's principle approach must satisfy. We propose two constructive theories of description that may underlie Davidson's approach and this deeper structure leads us to formulating a dilemma according to which Davidson's approach entails either a non-physicalist type-identity reductive and monistic structure of events; or else it entails a structure of events that requires what we call token-substance dualism. We consider some issues which seem to suggest that the first horn of this dilemma collapses into a reductive type-identity physicalist theory, contrary to Davidson's intent. Finally, we show how Davidson's achievement of accounting for some freedom of the mental from the physical and the anomaly of the mental within anomalous monism can be achieved in a fully reductive type-identity physicalist theory. (shrink)

Reductive physicalism is a minority view in contemporary philosophy as well as in science, and therefore arguments for endorsing it often amount to arguments against the alternative views, in particular so-called non-reductive physicalism. In this paper we put forward a new argument for reductive physicalism, according to which it is the best account of the empirical data that we have. In particular, we show that: (a) a reductive physicalist theory of the mind forms an essential part of the very argument (...) for the existence of an external world: if one rejects psychophysical identity physicalism, one’s case for believing in the existence of an external world is substantially weakened; and (b) the success of a physical account of the mind is the most important criterion for the success of (future) physics; and (c) reductive physicalism is the only approach in which relying on science in order to account for the external world makes sense; and finally, (d) within reductive physicalism, one can provide a new criterion for theory preference in science, and a new argument for scientific realism. In our physicalist view the experience forms the initial data, which is then reduced to fundamental physics. (shrink)

According to contemporary computational neuroscience the mental is associated with computations implemented in the brain. We analyze in physical terms based on recent results in the foundations of statistical mechanics two well-known (independent) problems that arise for this approach: the problem of multiple-computations and the problem of multiple-realization. We show that within the computational theory of the mind the two problems are insoluble by the physics of the brain. We further show that attempts to solve the problems by the interactions (...) of the systems implementing the computations with an environment (in or outside the brain) must introduce non- physical factors, and therefore fail on physical grounds. We also show that the problems are endemic and pertain to other forms of functional theories of the mind, most notably, causal functionalism. Finally, we propose a physicalist reductive identity theory, which is a generalization of statistical mechanics for all the special sciences, and show that only a theory of this kind can provide physical solutions to the above two problems in computational neuroscience. We conclude that functionalism in the theory of mind must be replaced with a reductive identity theory. This result has far-reaching implications with respect to the research programs in brain science. (shrink)

We show that the so-called Multiple-Computations Theorem in cognitive science and philosophy of mind challenges Landauer’s Principle in physics. Since the orthodox wisdom in statistical physics is that Landauer’s Principle is implied by, or is the mechanical equivalent of, the Second Law of thermodynamics, our argument shows that the Multiple-Computations Theorem challenges the universal validity of the Second Law of thermodynamics itself. We construct two examples of computations carried out by one and the same dynamical process with respect to which (...) Landauer’s principle implies contradictory predictions concerning the entropy increase. Our two examples are based on a weak version of the Multiple-Computations Theorem, which is quite uncontroversial, and therefore they amount to a clear refutation of the universal validity of Landauer’s Principle. We consider some responses to this argument that do not attempt to single out one computation over the others, and we show that they do not work. We further consider ways out of the argument by externalist approaches supporting the computational theory of the mind who propose that the interaction of a computing system with the environment is enough to select a single computation over the others. We show on physical grounds that this approach fails too. We then reverse the direction of our challenge and formulate a dilemma for supporters of the computational theory of the mind: they must reject the causal closure of physic; or else they must accept on a priori grounds that Landauer’s Principle and the Second Law of thermodynamics are not universally valid. Finally, we present our version of a type–type mind-brain identity theory called Flat Physicalism, which is based on the paradigm case of statistical mechanics, and we show that it circumvents the challenge from Landauer’s Principle and the Multiple-Computations Theorem and does not fall prey to our dilemma. (shrink)

We start by very briefly describing the measurement problem in quantum mechanics and its solution by the Many Worlds Interpretation. We then describe the preferred basis problem, and the role of decoherence in the MWI. We discuss a number of approaches to the preferred basis problem and argue that contrary to the received wisdom, decoherence by itself does not solve the problem. We address Wallace’s emergentist approach based on what he calls Dennett’s criterion, and we compare the logical structure of (...) Wallace’s argument that the Hilbert space structure and the unitary dynamics should be considered a complete description of the physics of the universe with the logical structure of the EPR argument against the completeness of quantum mechanics. Then, we consider the nature of so-called “high level emergent facts” and Dennett’s criterion in Wallace’s approach and we discuss the implications of its non-reductive nature. Finally, we conclude that the MWI is not a straightforward interpretation of pure quantum mechanics that doesn't add anything to it. Whether or not it is more parsimonious than other quantum mechanical theories depends on the details of the additions. (shrink)

In our book The Road to Maxwell’s Demon (RMD) (Cambridge University Press 2012) we proposed a new outline for a reductive account of statistical mechanics in which thermodynamics is reduced to classical mechanics. In a recent review Valia Allori says that we misunderstood Boltzmann’s account of statistical mechanics with respect to two issues: (1) the nature of typicality considerations in Boltzmann’s explanation of the Second Law - and here she provides no argument whatsoever; and (2) Boltzmann’s notion of probability. As (...) to the second issue, unfortunately, there are flaws in her presentation of Boltzmann’s work as well as of ours. In this paper we briefly explain the difference between Boltzmann’s notion of probability and our notion, how the latter in fact complements Boltzmann’s ideas, and Allori’s flaws on these issues. (shrink)

The purpose of this article is twofold. First, it presents the urgent case of civil war, relatively undertheorized by just war theorists, along with the normative issues that pertain to this type of conflict and its participants specifically. Second, it suggests that this civil war perspective offers fresh support for the traditional “independence thesis”— separating just cause for war from the rules of its conduct—which is often criticized by contemporary moral philosophers.

War is bad for the environment, yet the environmental ramifications of warfare have not been widely addressed by just war theorists and revisionist philosophers of war. The law and legal scholars have paid more attention to protecting nature during armed conflict. But because the law focuses invariably on rules mitigating the conduct of hostilities rather than on objective justice of cause, environmental jus ad bellum has been explored even less extensively than environmental ethics in war. Setting out with the presumption (...) against the use of force and its exceptions, this article considers whether environmental harm can trigger a new justification for war, at whose behest, and what might be a proportionate response to aggressive or negligent harm to nature. Force is clearly justified against military attacks. Where environmental harm is not caused by military aggression, proportionality points towards a response short of war. Full‐scale warfare will likely be counterproductive in protecting nature. This is less true if war is fought by drones destroying specific targets, or by cyber‐war, or by alternatives (or supplements) to war such as boycotts, ‘lawfare’, and ‘information/media warfare’. Responding in ways that minimize harm to nature also helps demonstrate ‘right intention’. (shrink)

_Humanizing Education_ offers historic examples of humanizing educational spaces, practices, and movements that embody a spirit of hope and change. From Dayton, Ohio, to Barcelona, Spain, this collection of essays from the _Harvard Educational Review_ carries readers to places where people have first imagined—and then organized—their own educational responses to dehumanizing practices and conditions. Contributors include Montse Sánchez Aroca, William Ayers, Kathy Boudin, Fernando Cardenal, Jeffrey M. R. Duncan-Andrade, Marco Garrido, Jay Gillen, Maxine Greene, Kathe Jervis, Nancy Uhlar Murray, Valerie (...) Miller, Wendy Ormiston, Ana Y. Ramos-Zayas, Vanessa Siddle Walker, Arthur E. Thomas, and Travis Wright. (shrink)