We have considered a simple word game called the word-morph. After making our participants play a stipulated number of word-morph games, we have analyzed the experimental data. We have given a detailed analysis of the learning involved in solving this word game. We propose that people are inclined to learn landmarks when they are asked to navigate from a source to a destination. We note that these landmarks are nodes that have high closeness-centrality ranking.

Prof. Iyengar's biography of Sri Aurobindo, long a standard reference work, is now in its fifth edition. The author's subtitle indicates the depth and breadth of the book, as it links the life of Sri Aurobindo, who played for our age the crucial role of leader of humanity's evolving destiny , with the history of India and the world. It also provides detailed discussions of Sri Aurobindo's writings, from the early poems and plays to the politics of Bande Mataram, (...) from the philosophy and social thought of the Arya to the epic masterpiece of Savitri, as the essential keys to understanding his life and work. This book is available again after a long time. (shrink)

Having known classical wave optics and wave mechanics, can we reverse Schrödinger's path and extend the concept of families of rays of light to provide a new exact rendering of quantum optics including the Bose nature of photons? This question is answered in the affirmative, and the implications of the Bose symmetry for certain nonlocal correlations of the many-ray distribution functions are worked out. The similarities and the differences between classical and quantum wave optics are brought out. The ray-ray Bose (...) correlation is analyzed. The generating functional for the many-ray distribution functions is formulated; and the notion of paraxial illumination for quantum optics is made precise. (shrink)

In 1931 the mathematical logician Kurt Godel published a revolutionary paper that challenged certain basic assumptions underpinning mathematics and logic. A colleague of Albert Einstein, his theorem proved that mathematics was partly based on propositions not provable within the mathematical system and had radical implications that have echoed throughout many fields. A gripping combination of science and accessibility, Godel’s Proof by Nagel and Newman is for both mathematicians and the idly curious, offering those with a taste for logic and philosophy (...) the chance to satisfy their intellectual curiosity. (shrink)

First published in 2000. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

A conference celebrating the tercentenary of the publication of Leibniz’s Nouveau système will be held at the University of York, England, under the auspices of the Leibniz Gesellschaft of Hannover, and in collaboration with the British Society for the History of Philosophy, the Leibniz Society of North America, and the Lessico Intellettuale Europeo in Rome. Speakers will include R. M. Adams, S. Brown, G. Hartz, A. Lamarra, G. M. Ross, M. Mugnai, R. Palaia, G.H.R. Parkinson, P. Phemister, H. Poser, D. (...) Rutherford, C. Wilson. For further details contact Roger Woolhouse, Department of Philosophy, University of York, England Y01 5DD. (shrink)

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716) was one of the seventeenth century's most important thinkers. A philosopher, mathematician and scientist, his work is comparable in scope and importance only to that of Newton and Descartes. His work dominated German philosophy until Kant, and was revived in the early part of this century when his important work on logic was re-discovered. This four volume set contains 97 of the most important essays ever written about Leibniz's work. The selection has been made to bring (...) out the scope of Leibniz's work in all the areas he wrote upon, as well as its importance to contemporary philosophy and the history of philosophy. It will be an essential reference work for anyone concerned with seventeenth century philosophy and science, as well as to all Leibniz specialists. (shrink)

Contributed articles presented at the National Seminar on Language and Mind held at Hyderabad in 2004.

Human-eyelid conditioning was the principal source of information on Pavlovian conditioning, especially human, in the 1950s and 1960s, but it suffered a sharp decline in productivity, beginning in the late 1960s. The present article treats the decline as a case study with potential implications concerning the survival contingencies of research specialties. We make use of questionnaire data from eyelid-conditioning researchers and examine a variety of publication, topic-of-investigation, and institutional data to identify the major factors in the decline of human-eyelid conditioning.

Tara Smith's book on Rand's ethics is reviewed by Stephen Hicks for *Philosophy in Review.*.

The standard theory for belief revision provides an elegant and powerful framework for reasoning about how a rational agent should change its beliefs when confronted with new information. However, the agents considered are extremely idealized. Some recent models attempt to tackle the problem of plausible belief revision by adding structure to the belief bases and using nonstandard inference operations. One of the key ideas is that not all of an agent's beliefs are relevant for an operation of belief change.In this (...) paper we incorporate the insights pertaining to local change and relevance sensitivity with the use of approximate inference relations. These approximate inference relations offer us partial solutions at any stage of the revision process. The quality of the approximations improves as we allow for more and more resources to be used. We are provided with upper and lower bounds to what would be obtained with the use of classical inference. (shrink)

Die Wissenschaftspsychologie wird als ein Gebiet interdisziplinärer Forschungen an der Grenze zwischen Psychologie und allgemeiner Theorie und Geschichte der Wissenschaft erörtert und ihr Verhältnis zu den anderen Richtungen der Wissenschaftsforschung, insbesondere zur Logik der Wissenschaftsentwicklung und zur Wissenschaftssoziologie dargestellt. Dabei heben die Autoren hervor, daß die Ausarbeitung jeder dieser Disziplinen eine Umgestaltung ihrer Ausgangsbegriffe und -methoden voraussetzt, was der Natur der Wissenschaft als spezifischen Systems und als besonderer sich historisch entwickelnder Tätigkeitsform entspricht. Als Grundprobleme werden u.a. behandelt: Kreativität, Motivation und (...) Schaffensdynamik des Wissenschaftlers, das Verhältnis von Persönlichkeit und Kollektiv in der modernen Wissenschaft und das Funktionieren "kleiner Gruppen". (shrink)

This paper seeks to explore the implementation of corporate ethical culture and policies as an adjunct to formal forms of corporate governance. The insurance industry utilises a variety of external governance structures, but is almost unique in that stock companies (which are exposed to an external market for corporate control) and mutual companies (which are owned by a subset of their customers) are in active competition. A questionnaire survey of senior executives in U.K. insurance companies was undertaken to explore the (...) implementation of ethical policies and codes, to investigate ethical attitudes, and to analyze the extent to which these policies and attitudes varied among companies. The results suggest that ethical policies have a higher profile and ethical attitudes and behaviour are more positive in mutual as opposed to stock insurance companies. These findings support the contention that a strong corporate ethical culture may be utilised to enhance formal corporate governance instruments. (shrink)

This set reprints volumes that were orginally published by Routledge and Kegan Paul Ltd. in 1953. Landmark volumes at the time of their original publication, these titles do not merely expound the theoretical constructions of Russian philosophers, but also relate these constructions to the general conditions of Russian life. Volume One examines the historical conditions of the development of philosophy in Russia and explores the general features of Russian philosophy. It also surveys the principal works on the history of Russian (...) philosophy. Volume Two includes biographies and examination of the themes of the following philosophers; Vladimir Solovyov, V.D. Kudryavtsev, N.F. Fyodorov and Later Hegelians such as Chicherin, Debolski and Bakunin. This volume also provides analysis of various schools of thought in Russian philosophy in the twentieth century, for example; Neo-Leibzianism, Modern Positivism and New-Marxism to name but a few. (shrink)