The US neutrino community gathered at the Workshop on the Intermediate Neutrino Program at Brookhaven National Laboratory February 4-6, 2015 to explore opportunities in neutrino physics over the next five to ten years. Scientists from particle, astroparticle and nuclear physics participated in the workshop. The workshop examined promising opportunities for neutrino physics in the intermediate term, including possible new small to mid-scale experiments, US contributions to large experiments, upgrades to existing experiments, R&D plans and theory. The workshop was organized into (...) two sets of parallel working group sessions, divided by physics topics and technology. Physics working groups covered topics on Sterile Neutrinos, Neutrino Mixing, Neutrino Interactions, Neutrino Properties and Astrophysical Neutrinos. Technology sessions were organized into Theory, Short-Baseline Accelerator Neutrinos, Reactor Neutrinos, Detector R&D and Source, Cyclotron and Meson Decay at Rest sessions.This report summarizes discussion and conclusions from the workshop. (shrink)

This volume is a collection of essays by various contributors in honor of the late Laurence Berns, Richard Hammond Elliot Tutor Emeritus at St. John's College, Annapolis. The essays address the literary, political, theological, and philosophical themes of his life's work as a scholar, teacher, and constant companion of the "great books.".

Acute exercise consistently benefits both emotion and cognition, particularly cognitive control. We evaluated acute endurance exercise influences on emotion, domain-general cognitive control, and the cognitive control of emotion, specifically cognitive reappraisal. Thirty-six endurance runners, defined as running at least 30 miles per week with one weekly run of at least 9 miles (21 female, age 18-30 years) participated. In a repeated measures design, participants walked at 57% age-adjusted maximum heart rate (HRmax) (range 51-63%) and ran at 70% HRmax (range 64-76%) (...) for 90 minutes on two separate days. Participants completed measures of emotional state and the Stroop test of domain-general cognitive control before, every 30 minutes during, and 30 minutes after exercise. Participants also completed a cognitive reappraisal task after exercise. Functional near-infrared spectroscopy tracked changes in oxygenated and deoxygenated hemoglobin levels in the prefrontal cortex (PFC). Endurance exercise elevated positive emotion and cognitive reappraisal success. Endurance exercise reduced Stroop response time and test-evoked PFC oxygenation during exercise. Results suggest that even at relatively moderate intensities, endurance athletes benefit emotionally from running both during and after exercise, and task-related prefrontal cortex oxygenation reductions do not appear to hinder prefrontal-dependent cognitive control. (shrink)

Psychedelics have been recognized as model interventions for studying altered states of consciousness. However, few empirical studies of the shamanic state of consciousness, which is anecdotally similar to the psychedelic state, exist. We investigated the neural correlates of shamanic trance using high-density electroencephalography (EEG) in 24 shamanic practitioners and 24 healthy controls during rest, shamanic drumming, and classical music listening, followed by an assessment of altered states of consciousness. EEG data were used to assess changes in absolute power, connectivity, signal (...) diversity, and criticality, which were correlated with assessment measures. We also compared assessment scores to those of individuals in a previous study under the influence of psychedelics. Shamanic practitioners were significantly different from controls in several domains of altered states of consciousness, with scores comparable to or exceeding that of healthy volunteers under the influence of psychedelics. Practitioners also displayed increased gamma power during drumming that positively correlated with elementary visual alterations. Furthermore, shamanic practitioners had decreased low alpha and increased low beta connectivity during drumming and classical music and decreased neural signal diversity in the gamma band during drumming that inversely correlated with insightfulness. Finally, criticality in practitioners was increased during drumming in the low and high beta and gamma bands, with increases in the low beta band correlating with complex imagery and elementary visual alterations. These findings suggest that psychedelic drug-induced and non-pharmacologic alterations in consciousness have overlapping phenomenal traits but are distinct states of consciousness, as reflected by the unique brain-related changes during shamanic trance compared to previous literature investigating the psychedelic state. (shrink)

The purpose of this study was to evaluate, revise, and extend the Informed Consent Ontology (ICO) for expressing clinical permissions, including reuse of residual clinical biospecimens and health data. This study followed a formative evaluation design and used a bottom-up modeling approach. Data were collected from the literature on US federal regulations and a study of clinical consent forms. Eleven federal regulations and fifteen permission-sentences from clinical consent forms were iteratively modeled to identify entities and their relationships, followed by community (...) reflection and negotiation based on a series of predetermined evaluation questions. ICO included fifty-two classes and twelve object properties necessary when modeling, demonstrating appropriateness of extending ICO for the clinical domain. Twenty-six additional classes were imported into ICO from other ontologies, and twelve new classes were recommended for development. This work addresses a critical gap in formally representing permissions clinical permissions, including reuse of residual clinical biospecimens and health data. It makes missing content available to the OBO Foundry, enabling use alongside other widely-adopted biomedical ontologies. ICO serves as a machine-interpretable and interoperable tool for responsible reuse of residual clinical biospecimens and health data at scale. (shrink)

This book celebrates the work of Patricia Werhane, an iconic figure in business ethics. This festschrift is a collection of articles that build on Werhane’s contributions to business ethics in such areas as Employee Rights, the Legacy of Adam Smith, Moral Imagination, Women in Business, the development of the field of business ethics, and her contributions to such fields as Health Care, Education, Teaching, and Philosophy. All papers are new contributions to the management literature written by well-known business ethicists, such (...) as Norman Bowie, Richard De George, Ronald Duska, Edwin Hartman, Michael Hoffman, Mollie Painter-Morland, Mark Schwartz, Andrew Wicks, and others. The volume is comprised of articles that reflect on Werhane’s work as well as build on it as a way to advance further research. At the end of the festschrift, Pat Werhane provides responses to each chapter. The first chapter of the book also includes the overview of Patricia Werhane’s work and her academic career. The book is written to appeal to management scholars and graduate students interested in the areas of Business Ethics, Modern Capitalism, and Human Rights. Patricia Werhane is one of the most distinguished figures in the field of business ethics. She was a founder of the field, she is one of its leading scholars, and she has had a profound impact on the world of business practice. Among her many accomplishments, Pat is known for her original work on moral imagination, she is an acclaimed authority on employee rights in the workplace, and she is one of the leading scholars on Adam Smith. Having been active in Academia for over 50 years, Werhane is a prolific author of over a hundred articles and book chapters, and the author or editor of twenty-seven books, including Adam Smith and his Legacy for Modern Capitalism, Moral Imagination and Management Decision-Making, and co-authored books Organization Ethics in Health Care, Alleviating Poverty Through Profitable Partnerships, Obstacles to Ethical Decision-Making, Corporate Responsibility: The American Experience, and Research Approaches to Business Ethics and Corporate Responsibility. (shrink)

The death of Geoffrey Mure is a greater loss to the world of scholarship than the present-day philosophical community is likely to recognize. He was one of the very few Oxford philosophers who had the courage and steadfastness to stick to his staunch belief in speculative Idealism when the explosion of Logical Positivism and the successive shock-waves of Empiricism and Ordinary Language Philosophy overwhelmed the Oxford schools. Mure’s philosophy was, therefore, not congenial to his colleagues. Nevertheless, throughout the hey-day of (...) the Rylian Empire, Mure remained at Oxford as the Warden of Merton, exerting what influence he could to keep alive the tradition of F.H. Bradley, Harold Joachim and R.G. Collingwood. Had he been appointed to the White’s Chair of Moral Philosophy or the Wykeham Professorship of Logic, the history of recent British philosophy would have been different, but that was hardly to be expected in the philosophical climate of the time. The force of the current against which Mure swam can be judged from the story told in the 1950s that as they walked down the High, students would point him out in incredulous wonder as the sole surviving Hegelian in Oxford. (shrink)

Peter Abelard (1079–1142 ce) was the most wide‐ranging philosopher of the twelfth century. He quickly established himself as a leading teacher of logic in and near Paris shortly after 1100. After his affair with Heloise, and his subsequent castration, Abelard became a monk, but he returned to teaching in the Paris schools until 1140, when his work was condemned by a Church Council at Sens. His logical writings were based around discussion of the “Old Logic”: Porphyry's Isagoge, aristotle'S Categories and (...) On Interpretation and boethius'S textbook on topical inference. They comprise a freestanding Dialectica (“Logic”; probably c.1116), a set of commentaries (known as the Logica [Ingredientibus], c. 1119) and a later (c. 1125) commentary on the Isagoge (Logica Nostrorum Petititoni Sociorum or Glossulae). In a work Abelard called his Theologia, issued in three main versions (between 1120 and c.1134), he attempted a logical analysis of trinitarian relations and explored the philosophical problems surrounding God's claims to omnipotence and omniscience. The Collationes (“Debates,” also known as “Dialogue between a Christian, a Philosopher and a Jew”; probably c.1130) present a rational investigation into the nature of the highest good, in which the Christian and the Philosopher (who seems to be modeled on a philosopher of pagan antiquity) are remarkably in agreement. The unfinished Scito teipsum (“Know thyself,” also known as the “Ethics”; c.1138) analyses moral action. (shrink)

Dispositional forgiveness is positively associated with many facets of wellbeing and has protective implications against depression and anxiety in adolescents. However, little work has been done to examine neurobiological aspects of forgiveness as they relate to clinical symptoms. In order to better understand the neural mechanisms supporting the protective role of forgiveness in adolescents, the current study examined the middle frontal gyrus, which comprises the majority of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and is associated with cognitive regulation, and its relationship to (...) forgiveness and clinical symptoms in a sample of healthy adolescents. In this cross-sectional study, larger MFG volume was significantly associated with higher self-reported dispositional forgiveness scores and lower levels of depressive and anxiety symptoms. Forgiveness mediated the relationship between MFG volume and both depressive and anxiety symptom levels. The mediating role of forgiveness in the relationship between MFG volume and clinical symptoms suggests that one way that cognitive regulation strategies supported by this brain region may improve adolescent mental health is via increasing a capacity for forgiveness. The present study highlights the relevance of forgiveness to neurobiology and their relevance to emotional health in adolescents. Future longitudinal studies should focus on the predictive quality of the relationship between forgiveness, brain volume and clinical symptoms and the effects of forgiveness interventions on these relationships. (shrink)

Moral problems such as climate change and global poverty result from widespread human action, and hence, are unaffected by changes in any individual's behavior—for instance, the harms of climate change will obtain whether I drive my car or not. This problem of causal impotence seems potentially devastating for consequentialists, but more easily addressed by deontologists. The deontologist can argue that (e.g.) even if our acts will have no effect on climate change, our using fossil fuels makes us complicit in, and (...) hence, blameworthy for, these wrongs. We argue that, despite initial appearances, appeals to complicity do not extricate deontologists from this problem. When our actions do not make a difference, we cannot be held responsible for being complicit in wrongs such as climate change and global poverty. As a result, we conclude that the problem of causal impotence is as vexing for deontologists as it is for consequentialists. (shrink)

1 My first teacher of philosophy, at what is now Rhodes University in South Africa, was Arthur R. Lord, a man who deserves to be well known, though today few people will ever have heard of him. He was himself a pupil of J.A. Smith and E.F. Carritt at Oxford in the early years of this century, during the heyday of British Idealism. In 1911 he won the Green Moral Philosophy Prize with a voluminous dissertation on the passions, which I (...) read in typescript when I was a student, but which was never published and disappeared after his death in 1940. (shrink)

By theword problemfor some class of algebraic structures we mean the problem of determining, given a finite setEof equations between words and an additional equationx=y, whetherx=ymust hold in all structures satisfying each member ofE. In 1947 Post [P] showed the word problem for semigroups to be undecidable. This result was strengthened in 1950 by Turing, who showed the word problem to be undecidable forcancellation semigroups,i.e. semigroups satisfying thecancellation propertyNovikov [N] eventually showed the word problem for groups to be undecidable.In 1966 (...) Gurevich [G] showed the word problem to be undecidable forfinitesemigroups. However, this result on finite structures has not been extended to cancellation semigroups or groups; indeed it is easy to see that a finite cancellation semigroup is a group, so both questions are the same. We do not here settle the word problem for finite groups, but we do show that the word problem is undecidable for finite semigroups with zero satisfying an approximation to the cancellation property. (shrink)

The potential for the occurrence of multiple-role relationships is increased when professors also consult with athletic teams on their campuses. Such multiple-role relationships have potential ethical implications that are unclear and largely unexplored, and consultants may find multiple-role relationships both difficult to deal with and unavoidable. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to explore the nature of teacher-practitioner multiple-role relationships. Participants (N = 35) were recruited from Association for the Advancement of Applied Sport Psychology (AAASP) certified consultants (CCs) who (...) were also affiliated with a university (N = 68). All participants completed a 28-item survey exploring the incidence and relevant issues pertaining to multiple-role relationships. Chi-square analyses revealed that licensed mental health practitioners (i.e., psychologists and counselors) were more likely than nonlicensed AAASP CCs to believe that multiple-role relationships were never appropriate in sport psychology, 2(1, N = 30) = 12.80, p < .001, and to have never taken part in a multiple-role relationship, 2(1, N = 33) = 12.44, p < .001. Independent samples t tests revealed that mental health practitioners also reported that they would have higher levels of concern for both the practitioner, t(30) = -2.77, p = .009, and the client, t(30) = -2.50, p = .018, in such a relationship. (shrink)

The potential for the occurrence of multiple-role relationships is increased when professors also consult with athletic teams on their campuses. Such multiple-role relationships have potential ethical implications that are unclear and largely unexplored, and consultants may find multiple-role relationships both difficult to deal with and unavoidable. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to explore the nature of teacher-practitioner multiple-role relationships. Participants (N=35) were recruited from Association for the Advancement of Applied Sport Psychology (AAASP) certified consultants (CCs) who were also (...) affiliated with a university (N=68). All participants completed a 28-item survey exploring the incidence and relevant issues pertaining to multiple-role relationships. Chi-square analyses revealed that licensed mental health practitioners (i.e., psychologists and counselors) were more likely than nonlicensed AAASP CCs to believe that multiple-role relationships were never appropriate in sport psychology, ?²(1,N= 30) = 12.80, p <.001, and to have never taken part in a multiple-role relationship, ?²(1, N= 33) = 12.44, p<.001. Independent samples t tests revealed that mental health practitioners also reported that they would have higher levels of concern for both the practitioner, r(30) = -2.77, p = .009, and the client, f(30) = -2.50, p = .018, in such a relationship. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2008 APA, all rights reserved). (shrink)

Alterations to cognitive function are often reported with depression and anxiety symptoms, yet few studies have examined the same associations with mental well-being. This study examined the association between mental well-being, depression and anxiety symptoms and cognitive function in 1502 healthy adult monozygotic and dizygotic twins, and the shared/unique contribution of genetic and environmental variance. Using linear mixed models, mental well-being was positively associated with sustained attention, inhibition, cognitive flexibility, motor coordination and working memory, whereas depression and anxiety symptoms were (...) associated with poorer sustained attention, inhibition, cognitive flexibility and executive function. Bivariate twin modelling showed well-being shared a small environmental correlation with motor coordination and a small genetic correlation with working memory. Trivariate twin modelling showed well-being shared a small genetic correlation with inhibition, whereas depression and anxiety symptoms shared a small environmental correlation with inhibition. The remaining variance was mostly driven by unique G and/or E variance. Overall, well-being and depression and anxiety symptoms show both independent and shared relationships with cognitive functions but this is largely attributable to unique G or E variance and small shared G/E variance between pairs of variables. (shrink)

Movement sonification can improve motor control in both healthy subjects (e.g., learning or refining a sport skill) and those with sensorimotor deficits (e.g., stroke patients and deafferented individuals). It is not known whether improved motor control and learning from movement sonification are driven by feedback-based real-time (“online”) trajectory adjustments, adjustments to internal models over multiple trials, or both. We searched for evidence of online trajectory adjustments (muscle twitches) in response to movement sonification feedback by comparing the kinematics and error of (...) reaches made with online (i.e., real-time) and terminal sonification feedback. We found that reaches made with online feedback were significantly more jerky than reaches made with terminal feedback, indicating increased muscle twitching (i.e., online trajectory adjustment). Using a between-subject design, we found that online feedback was associated with improved motor learning of a reach path and target over terminal feedback; however, using a within-subjects design, we found that switching participants who had learned with online sonification feedback to terminal feedback was associated with a decrease in error. Thus, our results suggest that, with our task and sonification, movement sonification leads to online trajectory adjustments which improve internal models over multiple trials, but which themselves are not helpful online corrections. (shrink)

Introduction, by H. J. Cargas.--St. Paul and Teilhard de Chardin, by J. H. Adams.--Teilhard and Dante, by M. Gable.--Tennyson and Teilhard, by E. R. August.--Teilhard, neo-Marxism, existentialism, by M. Barthelemy-Madaule.--Whitman, Teilhard, and Jung, by R. Benoit.--C. G. Jung and Teilhard de Chardin, by N. Braybrooke.--Camus and Teilhard, by P. Rosazza.--Bonhoeffer and Teilhard, by C. M. Hegarty.--Voices of convergence: Teilhard, McLuhan, and Brown, by D. J. Leary.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 41.4 (2003) 561-562 [Access article in PDF] Gianni Paganini, Miguel Benítez, and James Dybikowski, editors. Scepticisme, Clandestinité et Libre Pensée. Paris: Honoré Champion, 2002. Pp. 382. Cloth, €60.00. This book consists of papers from two Tables rondes held in Dublin in 1999 on the occasion of the Tenth International Congress on the Enlightenment. The contributors are: Paganini, Benítez, Dybikowski, Alan Charles Kors, Winfried (...) Schröder, José R. Maia Neto, Adam Sutcliffe, Justin Champion, Antony McKenna, Lorenzo Bianchi, Christine Berkvens-Stevelinck, Pierre Lurbe, Stephen David Snobelen, Nigel Aston, and Stuart Brown. There is remarkably little overlap among the papers and Paganini has clearly insisted on very [End Page 561] high standards. Because of space limitations, I shall focus on several of the general themes which run through the book rather than on individual contributions.Despite the phenomenal success Richard Popkin and collaborators like the late Charles B. Schmitt, Giorgio Tonelli, and Ezequiel de Olaso have had in documenting the amazing impact of skepticism in the Renaissance and in the years up to the Enlightenment, this volume demonstrates that skepticism, that many-faceted force, continued throughout the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. After Bayle, and the application of his special forms of skepticism to theological topics—forms which were often employed, contrary to Bayle's probable intentions, in defense of atheism—skepticism went "underground." A large variety of literature was circulated in manuscript form, the clandestine literature of the period. The lesson which this conference celebrates is that skepticism did not cease being a major cultural force. Thus there is, thanks to the philosophical dimension of the clandestine literature in the eighteenth century, a transition from Christian rationalism to an anti-Christian rationalism.Major figures of the Enlightenment were, of course, well-acquainted with skepticism, e.g., Berkeley, Voltaire, Hume, Crousaz, Condillac, Reid, and Kant. Not surprisingly, the major topics discussed in these papers center around skepticism, fideism and atheism, proofs for the existence of God, and the status of the "preambles" to the faith. These all receive careful attention. The tension between the arguments for Christian Pyrrhonism versus anti-Christian rationalism runs through many of these papers. And of course Bayle's points of view on both sides of the Christian debate appear in much of the clandestine literature. The matter of the immortality of the soul is carefully discussed. What is the status of this doctrine? Is it a question of Church dogma or is it another belief to be discarded in the light of reason?The connection perceived to hold between atheism and political legitimacy are explored in several papers. In the seventeenth century, Locke would exclude atheists from the body politic, in part because they were unable to truthfully swear an oath. Atheists were perceived as a danger for many eighteenth-century figures and the political need to suppress atheism was widely understood and accepted by those in the various religious establishments. Bayle's two-century-old attempt to break the putative logical tie between morality and religion failed in his own day, and despite the efforts of the authors of clandestine philosophical literature, the intimate link Bayle tried to break seems to be stronger than ever in much of the world today. It is interesting that the United States is virtually the only industrial and democratic society in which atheists are virtually precluded from being political candidates in federal, and probably most local, elections. Among other things, the papers in this volume help one to understand just how difficult breaking free from theological constraints in the interest of political freedom has proved to be. Harry McFarland Bracken Arizona State University, Tempe... (shrink)

Dear Mr. Lucas, I was wondering if you had come across Query 44 of George Berkeley's ``Analyst: A discourse addressed to an infidel mathematician"?. It reads: ``Whether the difference between a mere computer and a man of science be not that one computes on principles clearly conceived and by rules evidently demonstrated, whereas the other [i.e a man] doth not?" Not bad for 1734!

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Temple as Ship in Odyssey 6.10R. Drew GriffithLike the good eighth-century oecist that he was,1 the founder of Scheria, Phaeacian king Nausithous, son of Poseidon and grandfather of Nausicaa and Clytonaus, adorned his new city with temples of the gods (, Od. 6.10). This phrase, a hapax in Homer, occupies the same metrical seat immediately before the hephthemimeral caesura as the common ship formula (cf., 24.299, also a hapax). (...) It is plausible, therefore, that the bard who described the work of this ship-loving king used the formula as a formal model. The note argues that this bard thought that temples were ships in which gods traveled. Though this claim may seem surprising at first, cultic, architectural, and linguistic aspects of the epics all support it.Let us begin with cult. From Iliad 1 on, epiphanies are common (43-47, 194-95, 359-61).2 While some gods like Apollo work from afar, most need physical contact, for example, in helping suppliants, and human travel to Olympus like that of Otus and Ephialtes or Bellerophon is out of the question. Gods periodically irrupt into the natural world: Zeus comes down in lightning (e.g., Ar. Pax 42); drinkers take in Dionysus and grow giddy (e.g., Soph. Ant. 964); one sees Pan in any sudden skittishness of the flock (e.g., Eur. Med. 1172). The trick, then, is to channel the gods' [End Page 541] strength to make it propitious. Perhaps for this reason, the basic prayer is the cletic hymn (Men. Rhet. 334.25-336.4) that asks the god to come to the worshipper (carm. pop. 871.1 PMG; Sappho fr. 1.5, 25, 2.1 Lobel-Page, Voigt; Anacreon 357.7 PMG = fr. 14.7 Gentili; Pl. Leg. 712B; Apocalypse 22.20) and may describe a magic vehicle for the purpose (Sappho fr. 1.8-9 Lobel-Page, Voigt),3 like the self-moving aerial car, vimāna, of Sanskrit verse to which a boat is compared at Raghuvanśa 16.68.4 Those who pray often do so by the sea (Il. 1.34, 348-51; Od. 2.260-61; Pind. Ol. 1.71-73, 6.58), and ships may be the site of epiphanies (e.g., Hymn. Hom. Dion. 2, etc.; cf. Exekias ABV 146,21; Hymn Hom. Ap. 388-451).When the Trojan women dedicate a robe to Athena (Il. 6.269-78), we are not told that they use a ship to carry it, but in the similar offering at the Panathenaea, such was indeed the case.5 This ship may have been a comparatively late addition to the Athenian festival, but it has a good Bronze Age antecedent as proved by the Theran ship-fresco.6Turning now to architecture, we note that early temples were perhaps quite small, since as adyta (Il. 5.448, etc.) or abata, which worshippers did not enter,7 they have no functional lower size limit. Surviving Greek temples, all of archaic date or later, are imposing stone structures but bear traces of wooden prototypes, pillars having replaced roughhewn logs and decorative guttae treenails. Excavators have found terracotta model-shrines at Perachora and in the Argive Heraeum,8 some of which may have been portable like those of the Egyptian Amun, Mut, and Chonsu, the juggernaut of Puri in Orissa, or the Tent of Meeting, the earliest Israelite shrine (Exod. 33.7, etc.).Greek temples were astronomically oriented, typically facing sunrise on the foundation day (cf. Plut. Num. 14.4; Lucian De Domo 6), while snubbing humbler coordinates like roads or nearby buildings.9 In [End Page 542] this, they resemble Khufu's pyramid in Egypt, the so-called air shafts of which helped the pharaoh's soul sail to its eternal home in the constellation Orion, giving like an alidad the angles between the tomb itself, the pharaoh's "horizon of eternity," (3ḫ.t (nt), Papyrus Abbott 2.2; The Great Harris Papyrus 3.6),10 the pole-star, and his final destination.11 This fact suggests a link with navigation, for Greeks connected ships and stars, thanks to the navigator's art. With both magnetite and iron,12 but... (shrink)

A recursive enumerator for a function h is an algorithm f which enumerates for an input x finitely many elements including h(x), f is a k(n)-enumerator if for every input x of length n, h(x) is among the first k(n) elements enumerated by f. If there is a k(n)-enumerator for h then h is called k(n)-enumerable. We also consider enumerators which are only A-recursive for some oracle A. We determine exactly how hard it is to enumerate the Kolmogorov function, which (...) assigns to each string x its Kolmogorov complexity: • For every underlying universal machine U, there is a constant a such that C is k(n)-enumerable only if k(n) ≥ n/a for almost all n. • For any given constant k, the Kolmogorov function is k-enumerable relative to an oracle A if and only if A is at least as hard as the halting problem. • There exists an r.e., Turing-incomplete set A such for every non-decreasing and unbounded recursive function k, the Kolmogorov function is k(n)-enumerable relative to A. The last result is obtained by using a relativizable construction for a nonrecursive set A relative to which the prefix-free Kolmogorov complexity differs only by a constant from the unrelativized prefix-free Kolmogorov complexity. Although every 2-enumerator for C is Turing hard for K, we show that reductions must depend on the specific choice of the 2-enumerator and there is no bound on the quantity of their queries. We show our negative results even for strong 2-enumerators as an oracle where the querying machine for any x gets directly an explicit list of all hypotheses of the enumerator for this input. The limitations are very general and we show them for any recursively bounded function g: • For every Turing reduction M and every non-recursive set B, there is a strong 2-enumerator f for g such that M does not Turing reduce B to f. • For every non-recursive set B, there is a strong 2-enumerator f for g such that B is not wtt-reducible to f. Furthermore, we deal with the resource-bounded case and give characterizations for the class ${\rm S}_{2}^{{\rm P}}$ introduced by Canetti and independently Russell and Sundaram and the classes PSPACE, EXP. • ${\rm S}_{2}^{{\rm P}}$ is the class of all sets A for which there is a polynomially bounded function g such that there is a polynomial time tt-reduction which reduces A to every strong 2-enumerator for g. • PSPACE is the class of all sets A for which there is a polynomially bounded function g such that there is a polynomial time Turing reduction which reduces A to every strong 2-enumerator for g. Interestingly, g can be taken to be the Kolmogorov function for the conditional space bounded Kolmogorov complexity. • EXP is the class of all sets A for which there is a polynomially bounded function g and a machine M which witnesses A ∈ PSPACEf for all strong 2-enumerators f for g. Finally, we show that any strong O(log n)-enumerator for the conditional space bounded Kolmogorov function must be PSPACE-hard if P = NP. (shrink)

Most philosophical explorations of responsibility discuss the topic solely in terms of metaphysics and the "free will" problem. By contrast, these essays by leading philosophers view responsibility from a variety of perspectives -- metaphysics, ethics, action theory, and the philosophy of law. After a broad, framing introduction by the volume's editors, the contributors consider such subjects as responsibility as it relates to the "free will" problem; the relation between responsibility and knowledge or ignorance; the relation between causal and moral responsibility; (...) the difference, if any, between responsibility for actions and responsibility for omissions; the metaphysical requirements for making sense of "collective" responsibility; and the relation between moral and legal responsibility. The contributors include such distinguished authors as Alfred R. Mele, John Martin Fischer, George Sher, and Frances Kamm, as well as important rising scholars. Taken together, the essays in _Action, Ethics, and Responsibility_ offer a breadth of perspectives that is unmatched by other treatments of the topic. Contributors: Joseph Keim Campbell, David Chan, Randolph Clarke, E.J. Coffman, John Martin Fischer, Helen Frowe, Todd Jones, Frances Kamm, Antti Kauppinen, Alfred R. Mele, Michael O'Rourke, Paul Russell, Robert F. Schopp, George Sher, Harry S. Silverstein, Saul Smilansky, Donald Smith, Charles T. Wolfe The hardcover edition does not include a dust jacket. (shrink)

This collection demonstrates the strong influence that humanism and freethought had in developing the history and ideals of black intellectualism. Most people are quick to note the profound influence that religion has played in African-American history: consoling the downtrodden slave or inspiring the abolitionists, the underground railroad, and the civil rights movement. But few are aware of the role humanism played in shaping the black experience: developing the thought and motivating the actions of powerful African-American intellectuals. Section One of this (...) book offers biographical sketches of such prominent black humanists as Frederick Douglass, Cheikh Anta Diop, W.E.B. DuBois, Hubert H. Harrison, and Richard Wright. Section Two features essays by black humanists: Douglass, DuBois, Charles W. Faulkner, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Ishmael Jaffree, Claude McKay, Melvin B. Tolson, and Bruce Wright. Section Three offers the views of contemporary black African humanists: Freda Amakye Ansah, Emmanuel Kofi Mensah, Nkeonye Otakpor, Franz Vanderpuye, and Kwasi Wiredu. Section Four contains interviews conducted by Allen on the subjects of black humanist activism, the Afroasiatic roots of classical civilization, and the Harlem Renaissance with: Martin G. Bernal, Charles Faulkner, Leonard Harris, Norman Hill, and Alaine Locke. (shrink)

Several recent publications have questioned prevailing doctrines and offered new views on the antiquity of writing in early India and on the source and early development of the Indian scripts (Brāhmī and Kharoṣṭhī). Most of the new studies agree in assigning the origin of these scripts to a later period, i.e., the early Mauryan era (late fourth to mid third centuries B. C.), than has generally been done in the past, and in deriving them from prototypes in Semitic or Semitic-derived (...) scripts. The main works to be evaluated here are Oskar von Hinüber's Der Beginn der Schrift und frühe Schriftlichkeit in Indien and Harry Falk's Schrift im alten Indien: Ein Forschungsbericht mit Anmerkungen. Also discussed are two recent articles on similar topics, Gérard Fussman's "Les premiers systèmes d'écriture en Inde" and Kenneth R. Norman's "The Development of Writing in India and its Effect upon the Pāli Cannon," as well as some other relevant publications. The authority and significance of this new trend toward assigning a later date of origin for the Indian scripts is evaluated and placed in the context of broader historical and cultural issues. (shrink)

Following the Introduction, the essays to be listed, each with a reply by Errol E. Harris, comprise the principal content. B. Blanshard, “Harris on Internal Relations”; G.R. Lucas, Jr., “Science and Teleological Explanations”; J.E. Smith, “Harris’ Commentary on Hegel’s Logic”; G. Rinaldi, “The Identity of Thought and Being in Harris’ Interpretation of Hegel’s Logic”: T. Rockmore, “System and History: Harris on Hegel’s Logic”; R. Hepburn, “The Problem of Evil”; W. H. Walsh, “Hegel on Morality”; W.N.A. (...) Klever, “The Properties of the Intellect”; P. Muller, “The pons asinorum in Philosophy”; Wm. Earle, “The Evanescent Authority of Philosophy.”. (shrink)