First English-language translation of Lev Shestov's early writings on faith, ancient philosophy and biblical revelation.

Prominent thinkers such as Jurgen Habermas and Michael Sandel are warning that biomedical enhancements will undermine fundamental political values. Yet whether biomedical enhancements will undermine such values depends on how biomedical enhancements will function, how they will be administered and to whom. Since only few enhancements are obtainable, it is difficult to tell whether these predictions are sound. Nevertheless, such warnings are extremely valuable. As a society we must, at the very least, be aware of developments that could have harmful (...) consequences. Indeed, if important values were to be jeopardized, we should take appropriate measures to protect them. This paper focuses on four central values: solidarity, personal responsibility, equality and autonomy. It delineates the conditions under which biomedical enhancements would undermine these values. It also details the circumstances under which these values would be unaffected by enhancements as well as those under which they would be promoted. Specifying these conditions is valuable; it would enable society to prepare appropriate ethical guidelines and policy responses in advance. (shrink)

The main focus of the book is the presentation of the 'inertial' view of population growth. This view provides a rather simple model for complex population dynamics, and is achieved at the level of the single species without invoking species interactions. An important part of this account is the maternal effect. Investment of mothers in the quality of their daughters makes the rate of reproduction of the current generation depend not only on the current environment, but also on the environment (...) experienced by the previous generation. (shrink)

This article compares the sections on the qualities desirable in a wife in Abū Ḥāmid al-Ghazālī’s Iḥyāʾ ʿulūm al-dīn and Bar Hebraeus’s Ethicon, which the West Syrian writer modeled on al-Ghazālī’s work. The article first establishes that al-Ghazālī based his profile of the ideal wife on a jurisprudential discussion of the topic by his teacher, Imām al-Ḥaramayn al-Juwaynī, expanding it, however, by adding anecdotes from Sufi literature and reasoned arguments on how “the good wife” will best facilitate her husband’s devotion (...) to God. The article then moves to consider how Bar Hebraeus appropriates, reconfigures, and reframes as Christian teaching al-Ghazālī’s discussion. Finally, the article argues that the similarity between the two texts demonstrates that both carve out a particular notion of male piety intelligible and resonant in their different religious traditions and in the broader monotheistic culture of the premodern Middle East. (shrink)

Analyzes principal forces that determined the direction of Camus' thought on ethics and political values.

The Many-Worlds Interpretation (MWI) is an approach to quantum mechanics according to which, in addition to the world we are aware of directly, there are many other similar worlds which exist in parallel at the same space and time. The existence of the other worlds makes it possible to remove randomness and action at a distance from quantum theory and thus from all physics.

This is a philosophical paper in favor of the many-worlds interpretation of quantum theory. The necessity of introducing many worlds is explained by analyzing a neutron interference experiment. The concept of the “measure of existence of a world” is introduced and some difficulties with the issue of probability in the framework of the MWI are resolved.

[1]Aldanov, M. A. [i dr.] Religīoznyi︠a︡ i obshchestvennyi︠a︡ iskanīi︠a︡.--[2]Melgunov, S. P. N. V. Chaĭkovskīĭ v gody grazhdanskoĭ voĭny.

What is the most important reason for using Computer Vision methods in humanities research? In this article, I argue that the use of numerical representation and data analysis methods offers a new language for describing cultural artifacts, experiences and dynamics. The human languages such as English or Russian that developed rather recently in human evolution are not good at capturing analog properties of human sensorial and cultural experiences. These limitations become particularly worrying if we want to compare thousands, millions or (...) billions of artifacts—i.e. to study contemporary media and cultures at their new twenty-first century scale. When we instead use numerical measurements of image properties standard in Computer Vision, we can better capture details of a single artifact as well as visual differences between a number of artifacts–even if they are very small. The examples of visual dimensions that numbers can capture better then languages include color, shape, texture, contours, composition, and visual characteristics of represented faces, bodies and objects. The methods of finding structures and relationships in large numerical datasets developed in statistics and machine learning allow us to extend this analysis to very big datasets of cultural objects. Equally importantly, numerical image features used in Computer Vision also give us a new language to represent gradual and continuous temporal changes—something which natural languages are also bad at. This applies to both single artworks such as a film or a dance piece and also to changes in visual characteristics in millions of artifacts over decades or centuries. (shrink)

It is argued that the many-worlds interpretation is by far the best interpretation of quantum mechanics. The key points of this view are viewing the wave functions of worlds in three dimensions and understanding probability through self-locating uncertainty.

Social network structure has been argued to shape the structure of languages, as well as affect the spread of innovations and the formation of conventions in the community. Specifically, theoretical and computational models of language change predict that sparsely connected communities develop more systematic languages, while tightly knit communities can maintain high levels of linguistic complexity and variability. However, the role of social network structure in the cultural evolution of languages has never been tested experimentally. Here, we present results from (...) a behavioral group communication study, in which we examined the formation of new languages created in the lab by micro‐societies that varied in their network structure. We contrasted three types of social networks: fully connected, small‐world, and scale‐free. We examined the artificial languages created by these different networks with respect to their linguistic structure, communicative success, stability, and convergence. Results did not reveal any effect of network structure for any measure, with all languages becoming similarly more systematic, more accurate, more stable, and more shared over time. At the same time, small‐world networks showed the greatest variation in their convergence, stabilization, and emerging structure patterns, indicating that network structure can influence the community's susceptibility to random linguistic changes (i.e., drift). (shrink)

Progressions of iterated reflection principles can be used as a tool for the ordinal analysis of formal systems. We discuss various notions of proof-theoretic ordinals and compare the information obtained by means of the reflection principles with the results obtained by the more usual proof-theoretic techniques. In some cases we obtain sharper results, e.g., we define proof-theoretic ordinals relevant to logical complexity Π1 0 and, similarly, for any class Π n 0 . We provide a more general version of the (...) fine structure relationships for iterated reflection principles (due to U. Schmerl [25]). This allows us, in a uniform manner, to analyze main fragments of arithmetic axiomatized by restricted forms of induction, including IΣ n , IΣ n − , IΠ n − and their combinations. We also obtain new conservation results relating the hierarchies of uniform and local reflection principles. In particular, we show that (for a sufficiently broad class of theories T) the uniform Σ1-reflection principle for T is Σ2-conservative over the corresponding local reflection principle. This bears some corollaries on the hierarchies of restricted induction schemata in arithmetic and provides a key tool for our generalization of Schmerl's theorem. (shrink)

A well-known result states that, over basic Kalmar elementary arithmetic EA, the induction schema for ∑n formulas is equivalent to the uniform reflection principle for ∑n + 1 formulas . We show that fragments of arithmetic axiomatized by various forms of induction rules admit a precise axiomatization in terms of reflection principles as well. Thus, the closure of EA under the induction rule for ∑n formulas is equivalent to ω times iterated ∑n reflection principle. Moreover, for k < ω, k (...) times iterated ∑n reflection principle over EA precisely corresponds to the extension of EA by k nested applications of ∑n induction rule.The above relationship holds in greater generality than just stated. In fact, we give general formulas characterizing in terms of iterated reflection principles the extension of any given theory by k nested applications of ∑n or Πn induction rules. In particular, the closure of a theory T under just one application of ∑1 induction rule is equivalent to T together with ∑1 reflection principle for each finite Π2 axiomatized subtheory of T.These results have closely parallel ones in the theory of subrecursive function classes. The rules under study correspond, in a canonical way, to natural closure operators on the classes of provably recursive functions. Thus, ∑1 induction rule precisely corresponds to the primitive recursive closure operator, and ∑1 collection rule, introduced below, corresponds to the elementary closure operator. (shrink)

Provability logic GLP is well-known to be incomplete w.r.t. Kripke semantics. A natural topological semantics of GLP interprets modalities as derivative operators of a polytopological space. Such spaces are called GLP-spaces whenever they satisfy all the axioms of GLP. We develop some constructions to build nontrivial GLP-spaces and show that GLP is complete w.r.t. the class of all GLP-spaces.