Theology is both a human endeavor and something of Divine origin, insofar as it is a human attempt to make sense of certain Divinely revealed propositions. How does one reconcile these two elements? One attempt to do so was on the part of the Anglican theologian Rowan Williams. In sections I and II of chapter 1 of his work ‘On Christian Theology’, Williams speaks of the nature of authentic theological discourse, that is, theological discourse that has integrity. In his work (...) on theological integrity, Williams explores how human intentions or hidden agendas can potentially warp our attempt to make sense of the truths contained within Divine Revelation. He then goes on to speak of how to avoid such pitfalls. In this article, I will respond to the epistemological implications of William's thoughts on this topic. I will use various ideas from Catholic theology, including the development of doctrines and the notion that faith has both a subjective and objective element, to explore both the strengths and weaknesses of Williams's thought. (shrink)

This book puts forward a radical, unorthodox thesis with respect to the Anthropocene, the philosophy of Deleuze/Guattari and education. This book analyses the Anthropocene for its unconscious drives and develops a parallel mode of education and social change.

In Making Science, Cole shows how social variables and cognitive variables interact in the evaluation of frontier knowledge.

Le titre même donne à la transcription de cet exposé son résumé le plus exact et le plus laconique. Huit phrases extraites du corpus aristotélicien tracent un ensemble de dépendances où sont pris les mots que nous traduisons habituellement par nature et mouvement. L'exposé met en évidence le travail des concepts et son examen contrôlé par une lecture stricte du texte ancien et sa critique étymologique. La nature apparaît dès lors comme fondamentalement en écart par rapport à ellemême, et c'est (...) cela que nous avons encore à penser aujourd'hui. (shrink)

The French writer, philosopher, and mystic Simone Weil (1909-1943) was one of the most original spiritual personalities of the 20th century. Now Coles presents a brilliant portrait of the beloved and controversial figure who was a spiritual influence on T.S. Eliot, Flannery O'Connor, Adrienne Rich, and Albert Camus.

Undergraduate students with no prior classroom instruction in mathematical logic will benefit from this evenhanded multipart text by one of the centuries greatest authorities on the subject. Part I offers an elementary but thorough overview of mathematical logic of first order. The treatment does not stop with a single method of formulating logic; students receive instruction in a variety of techniques, first learning model theory (truth tables), then Hilbert-type proof theory, and proof theory handled through derived rules. Part II supplements (...) the material covered in Part I and introduces some of the newer ideas and the more profound results of logical research in the twentieth century. Subsequent chapters introduce the study of formal number theory, with surveys of the famous incompleteness and undecidability results of Godel, Church, Turing, and others. The emphasis in the final chapter reverts to logic, with examinations of Godel's completeness theorem, Gentzen's theorem, Skolem's paradox and nonstandard models of arithmetic, and other theorems. Unabridged republication of the edition published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. New York, 1967. Preface. Bibliography. Theorem and Lemma Numbers: Pages. List of Postulates. Symbols and Notations. Index. (shrink)

Roderich Tumulka’s GRWf theory offers a simple, realist and relativistic solution to the measurement problem of quantum mechanics. It is achieved by the introduction of a stochastic dynamical collapse of the wavefunction. An issue with dynamical collapse theories is that they involve an amendment to the Schrodinger equation; amending the dynamics of such a tried and tested theory is seen by some as problematic. This paper proposes an alteration to GRWf that avoids the need to amend the Schrodinger equation via (...) what might be seen as a primary set of solutions to the Schrodinger equation that satisfy a normalisation condition over space and time. The traditional Born-normalised solutions are shown to be conditionalisations of these primary solutions. (shrink)

A mass problem is a set of Turing oracles. If P and Q are mass problems, we say that P is weakly reducible to Q if for all Y ∈ Q there exists X ∈ P such that X is Turing reducible to Y. A weak degree is an equivalence class of mass problems under mutual weak reducibility. Let [Formula: see text] be the lattice of weak degrees of mass problems associated with nonempty [Formula: see text] subsets of the Cantor (...) space. The lattice [Formula: see text] has been studied in previous publications. The purpose of this paper is to show that [Formula: see text] partakes of hyperarithmeticity. We exhibit a family of specific, natural degrees in [Formula: see text] which are indexed by the ordinal numbers less than [Formula: see text] and which correspond to the hyperarithmetical hierarchy. Namely, for each [Formula: see text], let hα be the weak degree of 0, the αth Turing jump of 0. If p is the weak degree of any mass problem P, let p* be the weak degree of the mass problem P* = {Y | ∃X ⊆ BLR )} where BLR is the set of functions which are boundedly limit recursive in X. Let 1 be the top degree in [Formula: see text]. We prove that all of the weak degrees [Formula: see text], [Formula: see text], are distinct and belong to [Formula: see text]. In addition, we prove that certain index sets associated with [Formula: see text] are [Formula: see text] complete. (shrink)

I argue that God’s holiness as conceived in Hebrew Scripture grounds human obligations to obey divine commands. To disobey the commands of a holy God would disrespect a basic good, which we have decisive reason to avoid doing. God’s holiness may be a somewhat obscure property––though I propose transcendence and perfect morality as necessary conditions––but His omniscience and perfect morality guarantee that He would not command human beings to do things that His holiness would not ground His authority to command. (...) I conclude by replying to objections. (shrink)

I discuss a puzzle that shows there is a need to develop a new metaphysical interpretation of mathematical theories, because all well-known interpretations conflict with important aspects of mathematical activities. The new interpretation, I argue, must authenticate the ontological commitments of mathematical theories without curtailing mathematicians' freedom and authority to creatively introduce mathematical ontology during mathematical problem-solving. Further, I argue that these two constraints are best met by a metaphysical interpretation of mathematics that takes mathematical entities to be constitutively constructed (...) by human activity in a manner similar to the constitutive construction of the US Supreme Court by certain legal and political activities. Finally, I outline some of the philosophical merits of metaphysical interpretations of mathematical theories of this type. (shrink)

Thomas Aquinas, one of the "founding fathers" of just war theory, offers an account of virtuous warfare in practice. The author argues that Aquinas's approach to warfare, with its emphasis on justice and charity, is helpful in providing a coherent moral account of war to which Christians can subscribe. Particular attention is given to the role of charity, since this virtue is the distinguishing characteristic of the Christian soldier. Charity compels him to soldier justly, and by fighting justly, he is (...) elevated by God to friendship with God. Notable features of this approach are its emphasis on the criteria for judging whether a war is just and its relativizing of the criteria for proper combat behavior. (shrink)

The UK government has recently taken steps to exclude certain groups of migrants from free treatment under the National Health Service, most controversially from treatment for HIV. Whether this discrimination can have any coherent ethical basis is questioned in this paper. The exclusion of migrants of any status from any welfare system cannot be ethically justified because the distinction between citizens and migrants cannot be an ethical one.

Stephen Cole Kleene was one of the greatest logicians of the twentieth century and this book is the influential textbook he wrote to teach the subject to the next generation. It was first published in 1952, some twenty years after the publication of Godel's paper on the incompleteness of arithmetic, which marked, if not the beginning of modern logic. The 1930s was a time of creativity and ferment in the subject, when the notion of computable moved from the realm (...) of philosophical speculation to the realm of science. This was accomplished by the work of Kurt Gode1, Alan Turing, and Alonzo Church, who gave three apparently different precise definitions of computable. When they all turned out to be equivalent, there was a collective realization that this was indeed the right notion. Kleene played a key role in this process. One could say that he was there at the beginning of modern logic. He showed the equivalence of lambda calculus with Turing machines and with Godel's recursion equations, and developed the modern machinery of partial recursive functions. This textbook played an invaluable part in educating the logicians of the present. It played an important role in their own logical education.". (shrink)

The sense of agency is the experience of being the origin of a sensory consequence. This study investigates whether contextual beliefs modulate low-level sensorimotor processes which contribute to the emergence of the sense of agency. We looked at the influence of causal beliefs on ‘intentional binding’, a phenomenon which accompanies self-agency. Participants judged the onset-time of either an action or a sound which followed the action. They were induced to believe that the tone was either triggered by themselves or by (...) somebody else, although, in reality, the sound was always triggered by the participants. We found that intentional binding was stronger when participants believed that they triggered the tone, compared to when they believed that another person triggered the tone. These results suggest that high-level contextual information influences sensorimotor processes responsible for generating intentional binding. (shrink)

Romand Coles here explores the writings of Augustine, Foucault, and Merleau-Ponty in order to fashion an ethos that emphasizes the value of dialogical relationships between the self and others. In his view, each of these thinkers has made significant contributions that must figure in any reconsideration of the relationship between the self, ethics, and power. Whereas Augustine saw depth as the dimension of freedom and truth, according to Coles's reading, Foucault regarded depth as "that dimension in which we rout out (...) the other and constitute ourselves in light of hegemonic norms implanted deep within us." After drawing out those aspects of Foucault's thought which point toward a "dialogical artistic ethics," Coles explores Merleau-Ponty's philosophy of depth, arguing that it elucidates the "intercorporeality" of the world in a way that emphasizes the value of our dialogical relations with different others. In conclusion, he brings the three thinkers together to assess their rhetorical and philosophical similarities and differences, and to argue against the tendency to see all postmodern thought as nihilistic and incapable of developing an ethico-political stance. Coles's highly original work seeks to provide an alternative to the positions that have structured most recent debate in political philosophy. Thus, his book points up difficulties in both the individualist and the communitarian readings of politics and ethics, even as it seriously explores the ethical dimensions and possibilities of postmodernist thought. His attempt to develop an ethos based on a specific conception of selves and the world enables him to cast provocative light on the continuing dialogue between rationalists and relativists about the nature of both selves and our social and political institutions. (shrink)

This chapter talks about the war between the Formics, a seemingly malevolent species of aliens, and humans in the Ender's Game. The great tragedy of the violence that erupted from the Human/Formic war was the result of two deep misunderstandings. The Formics not only failed to grasp the capabilities of humanity, but humanity also deeply misunderstood the creatures that they would come to nickname “buggers.” These misunderstandings may have resulted from what is sometimes called “cultural incommensurability.” The chapter relates that (...) what is most important about Ender is not merely his ability to understand his “enemy,” but his ability to love them. He is able to harness the sympathies of the humans and change their minds about the buggers. Along with the Formic hive‐ queen, Ender now occupies the space in between the two conceptual schemes—a space he can never retreat from—and has begun translating their meanings. (shrink)

Previous research on linguistic relativity and economic decisions hypothesized that speakers of languages with obligatory tense marking of future time reference (FTR) should value future rewards less than speakers of languages which permit present tense FTR. This was hypothesized on the basis of obligatory linguistic marking (e.g., will) causing speakers to construe future events as more temporally distal and thereby to exhibit increased “temporal discounting”: the subjective devaluation of outcomes as the delay until they will occur increases. However, several aspects (...) of this hypothesis are incomplete. First, it overlooks the role of “modal” FTR structures which encode notions about the likelihood of future outcomes (e.g., might). This may influence “probability discounting”: the subjective devaluation of outcomes as the probability of their occurrence decreases. Second, the extent to which linguistic structures are subjectively related to temporal or probability discounting differences is currently unknown. To address these, we elicited FTR language and subjective ratings of temporal distance and probability from speakers of English, which exhibits strongly grammaticized FTR, and Dutch, which does not. Several findings went against the predictions of the previous hypothesis: Framing an FTR statement in the present (“Ellie arrives later on”) versus the future tense (“…will arrive…”) did not affect ratings of temporal distance; English speakers rated future statements as relatively more temporally proximal than Dutch speakers; and English and Dutch speakers rated future tenses as encoding high certainty, which suggests that obligatory future tense marking might result in less discounting. Additionally, compared with Dutch speakers, English speakers used more low-certainty terms in general (e.g., may) and as a function of various experimental factors. We conclude that the prior cross-linguistic observations of the link between FTR and psychological discounting may be caused by the connection between low-certainty modal structures and probability discounting, rather than future tense and temporality. (shrink)

This paper offers a reading of passages in Heidegger’s Nietzsche lectures in which Heidegger describes love as a feeling which grants an essential vision. I contend that by invoking this language of vision while simultaneously contrasting love with infatuation, Heidegger is implicitly attempting to situate love within his category of fundamental attunements. While Heidegger does not explicitly follow this thought through, I argue that doing so leads to a problem—namely, how can love be a fundamental attunement if such attunements are (...) necessarily objectless? I suggest we can see a response to this problem in Heidegger’s treatment of Plato’s Phaedrus within the same lecture course. I conclude by claiming that while Heidegger attempts to follow Plato in arguing that love is most properly directed towards Being, love nonetheless poses a challenge to Heidegger’s category of fundamental attunements which also strikes at the heart of his claim that ontology is first philosophy. (shrink)

Vols. for 1972- include papers from the Summer Linguistics Conference, University of California, Santa Cruz.

In December 2007 it was revealed that the British government is considering the exclusion of certain groups of migrants—those considered to be present “illegally”—from primary health care provided by the National Health Service. At present, practitioners have discretion to accept any individual for NHS treatment regardless of their status. A joint Home Office and Department of Health review is examining this access for foreign nationals, and the likely outcome is the restriction of access to irregular migrants, which would, according to (...) the Institute of Public Policy Research, affect around 390,000 people. In 2004 such groups were excluded from NHS secondary care, most controversially from treatment for HIV, and so the present proposal would bar them from all but emergency health treatment. (shrink)

Simon Blackburn’s supervenience argument—focusing on the mysterious “ban on mixed worlds”—is still subject to a variety of conflicting interpretations. In this paper, I hope to provide a defense of the argument that clarifies both the argument and the objections it must overcome. Many of the extant objections, I will argue, fail to engage the argument in its true form. And to counter the more compelling objections, it will be necessary to bring in additional argumentation that Blackburn himself does not clearly (...) provide. One important upshot of this discussion is that moral realism is not the only target of the argument: it raises trouble for a variety of metaethical views wed to realist-friendly construals of moral evaluation. Rightly understood, this argument not only survives the prominent responses, but turns out to be more powerful than his critics and Blackburn himself have recognized. (shrink)

There is an imbalance of gender roles in everyone's favorite space saga, with the vast majority of characters played by males while the female parts are minimized at nearly every turn. But the underlying problem of womanhood in Star Wars might be even more insidious than Darth Sidious himself. This chapter explains why it is difficult to embrace a strong female identity anywhere, let alone in the midst of intergalactic war. It analyzes whether the women in Star Wars have what (...) it takes to bring feminism to the Force. While Princess Leia and Queen Amidala are instantly recognizable figures in popular culture, the question arises whether they represent women positively. While Leia and Padmé are typically recognized as the feminist icons of Star Wars, they are not all the films have to offer. The women of Star Wars offer just as much as any of the individual male characters. (shrink)

Until comparatively recently, say the middle of the last century, spinal cord injury was fatal as pressure sores and other infections took their toll. Those with severe brain injuries, unable to move or even communicate, fared even worse; without movement or feeding such patients were nursed until nature took its course. Over the last few decades medical and nursing advances have enabled some of these vegetative patients to survive for considerable time, provoking, at times, ethical and legal dilemmas. Though they (...) survived, without overt behaviour or clear communication their carers were frequently unsure how much residual function remained. Now real progress is occurring in this area thanks to the application of neuro-scientific methods by some outstanding groups of workers. Subjects with severe brain injury may begin in complete, unresponsive coma but then ‘lighten’ to one of three categories. In vegetative state (VS), patients are apparently awake but without evidence of voluntary behaviour and have no apparent awareness of self or environment, whilst in minimally conscious state (MCS) patients have some behaviour beyond the reflex but are not able to communicate effectively. These conditions usually result from widespread brain damage at either or both cortical and subcortical levels due to injury or anoxia, though they can also be seen in end stage neurological conditions like Alzheimer’s. In locked in syndrome (LIS), patients ‘awake’ from coma, usually due to stroke, aware of their surroundings and their situation but unable to speak or move, beyond eye lid control and eye movement. For many, LIS will be recognised from Bauby’s extraordinary account in ‘The Diving Bell and the Butterfly,’ though, incidentally, it was presaged in Samuel Beckett’s novella ‘The Unnameable.’ LIS reflects a profound disconnection between brain and body, except for the upper cranial nerves involved in eyelid movement. The overriding question is how much awareness these patients have.. (shrink)

Typically, public discussions of questions of social import exhibit two important properties: they are influenced by conformity bias, and the influence of conformity is expressed via social networks. We examine how social learning on networks proceeds under the influence of conformity bias. In our model, heterogeneous agents express public opinions where those expressions are driven by the competing priorities of accuracy and of conformity to one’s peers. Agents learn, by Bayesian conditionalization, from private evidence from nature, and from the public (...) declarations of other agents. Our key findings are that networks that produce configurations of social relationships that sustain a diversity of opinions empower honest communication and reliable acquisition of true beliefs, and that the networks that do this best turn out to be those which are both less centralized and less connected. (shrink)

The research discussed in this paper centers around the convergence of extended reality (XR) platforms, computational design, digital fabrication, and critical urban study practices. Its aim is to cultivate interdisciplinary and multiscalar approaches within these domains. The research endeavor represents a collaborative effort between two primary disciplines: critical urban studies, which prioritize socio-environmental justice, and integrated digital design to production, which emphasize the realization of volumetric or voxel-based structural systems. Moreover, the exploration encompasses augmented reality to assess its utilization in (...) both the assembly process of the structures and the integration of phygital (physical and digital) data with the physical environment. Within the context of these research scopes, this paper introduces FabriCity-XR as an interactive phygital installation. In addition to presenting an overview of the integrated research driven and performative design to production methodologies, the project showcases the practical implementation of web-based augmented reality trails, eliminating the requirement for external applications for interaction. This approach allows users to seamlessly navigate and engage with phygital content overlaid on physical objects using their personal smart devices. The result is a captivating and immersive user experience that effectively merges the physical and digital realms. (shrink)

Much of Edmonton’s municipal past lacked any overarching development plan. Once such absentee municipal planning gave way to more concrete forms of municipal planning in terms of shaping the urban environment, conflicting goals soon emerged. Between 1949 and the early 1980s a conflict in planning goals within both the Edmonton District Planning Commission and the City of Edmonton, at this time governed with a commission board became apparent. Often this conflict played out in Edmonton’s river valley with competing visions of (...) preservation and freeway construction. River valley neighborhoods were threatened with land acquisition policies that viewed the river valley as the sole domain of parkland. Concurrently, those neighborhoods and much of the river valley were also threatened by the Metropolitan Edmonton Transportation Study. Citizen engagement in an otherwise politically apathetic city led to its demise, although the threat of large-scale removal of river valley parks and homes throughout the city loomed for some time. The period between 1949 and 1983 represents a period in Edmonton’s history where environmental protection policy clashed with transportation policy that advocated for the wholesale destruction of the river valley and countless homes. It is this conflict that led to increased political awareness that directly contributed to the demise of the METS scheme and gave rise to renewed support for river valley protection while making rapid transit a possibility for Edmonton. (shrink)