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Powers of Two: The Information Universe — Information as the Building Block of Everything
Is everything Information? This is a tantalizing question which emerges in modern physics, life sciences, astronomy and in today’s information and technology-driven society. In Powers of Two expert authors undertake a unique expedition - in words and images - throughout the world (and scales) of information. The story resembles, in a way, the classic Powers of Ten journeys through space: from us to the macro and the micro worlds . However, by following Powers of Two through the world of information, a completely different and timely paradigm unfolds. Every power of two, 1, 2, 4, 8…. tells us a different story: starting from the creation of the very first bit at the Big Bang and the evolution of life, through 50 years of computational science, and finally into deep space, describing the information in black holes and even in the entire universe and beyond…. All this to address one question: Is our universe made of information? In this book, we experience the Information Universe in nature and in our society and how information lies at the very foundation of our understanding of the Universe.From the Foreword by Robbert Dijkgraaf: This book is in many ways a vastly extended version of Shannon’s one-page blueprint. It carries us all the way to the total information content of the Universe. And it bears testimony of how widespread the use of data has become in all aspects of life. Information is the connective tissue of the modern sciences. […] Undoubtedly, future generations will look back at this time, so much enthralled by Big Data and quantum computers, as beholden to the information metaphor. But that is exactly the value of this book. With its crisp descriptions and evocative illustrations, it brings the reader into the here and now, at the very frontier of scientific research, including the excitement and promise of all the outstanding questions and future discoveries.
Powers, Parts and Wholes: Essays on the Mereology of Powers (Routledge Studies in Metaphysics)
This volume offers a fresh exploration of the parts–whole relations within a power and among powers. While the metaphysics of powers has been extensively examined in the literature, powers have yet to be studied from the perspective of their mereology. Powers are often assumed to be atomic, and yet what they can do—and what can happen to them—is complex. But if powers are simple, how can they have complex manifestations? Can powers have parts? According to which rules of composition do powers compose into powers? Given the centrality of powers in current scientific as well as philosophical thought, recognizing and understanding the ontological differences between atomic and mereologically complex powers is important, for both philosophy and science. The first part of this book explores how powers divide; the second part, how powers compose. The final part showcases some specific study cases in the domains of quantum mechanics and psychology. Powers, Parts and Wholes will be of interest to professional philosophers and graduate students working in metaphysics, philosophy of science and logic.
Practical Aesthetics (Thinking in the World)
This collection brings together artists and theoreticians to provide the first anthology of a new field: Practical Aesthetics. A work of art already contains its own criticism, a knowledge of its own which need not be conceptual or propositional. Yet today, there are many approaches to different forms of art that work on the brink between science and art, 'sensible cognition' and proposition, aesthetic knowledge and rational knowledge, while thinking with art (or the artistic material) rather than about it. This volumes presents ways of thinking with different forms of art (film, sound, dance, literature, etc), as well as new forms of aesthetic research and presentation such as Media Philosophy, the audiovisual essay, fictocriticism, the audio paper, and Artistic Research. It reveals how writing about art can become 'artistic' or 'poetic' in its own right: not only writing about artistic effects, but producing them in the first place. This takes art not as an object of (external) analysis, but as a subject with a knowledge in its own right, creating a co-composing 'conceptual interference pattern' between theory and practice. A 'practical aesthetics' thus understood, can be described as thinking with art, in order to find new ways to create worlds and thus to make the world perceivable in different ways.
Practical Applications of Computational Intelligence Techniques (International Series in Intelligent Technologies #16)
Computational intelligence paradigms have attracted the growing interest of researchers, scientists, engineers and application engineers in a number of everyday applications. These applications are not limited to any particular field and include engineering, business, banking and consumer electronics. Computational intelligence paradigms include artificial intelligence, artificial neural networks, fuzzy systems and evolutionary computing. Artificial neural networks can mimic the biological information processing mechanism in a very limited sense. Evolutionary computing algorithms are used for optimisation applications, and fuzzy logic provides a basis for representing uncertain and imprecise knowledge. Practical Applications of Computational Intelligence Techniques contains twelve chapters providing actual application of these techniques in the real world. Such examples include, but are not limited to, intelligent household appliances, aerial spray models, industrial applications and medical diagnostics and practice. This book will be useful to researchers, practicing engineers/scientists and students, who are interested in developing practical applications in a computational intelligence environment.
Practices of Truth in Philosophy: Historical and Comparative Perspectives
This volume provides a geographically and historically diverse overview of philosophical traditions that establish a deep connection between truth and practice, or even see truth itself as a kind of practice. Under the label “practices of truth” are subsumed disparate approaches that can be fruitfully brought together to explore the intersections between truth and practice in philosophy as well as to address a range of intriguing questions about truth that fall outside the domain of pure theory. The chapters in this volume provide a variety of perspectives on key practices of truth in philosophy and in the history of philosophy, enriching our understanding of the different ways in which truth and practice may be connected, including the role of certain practices in enabling philosophical insight into truth, the ways in which truth may actually be embedded in some practices, and the impact of truth on practice. Practices of Truth in Philosophy will appeal to scholars and advanced students interested in the history of philosophy, comparative philosophy, ethics, epistemology, and the metaphysics of truth.
Pragmatic Reason: Christopher Hookway and the American Philosophical Tradition (Routledge Studies in American Philosophy)
Christopher Hookway has been influential in promoting engagement with pragmatist and naturalist perspectives from classical and contemporary American philosophy. This book reflects on Hookway’s work on the American philosophical tradition and its significance for contemporary discussions of the understanding of mind, meaning, knowledge, and value. Hookway’s original and extensive studies of Charles S. Peirce have made him among the most admired and frequently referenced of Peirce’s interpreters. His work on classical American pragmatism has explored the philosophies of William James, John Dewey, and Josiah Royce, and examined the influence of pragmatist ideas outside of the United States. Additionally, Hookway has participated in a number of celebrated exchanges with some of the most high-profile figures of twentieth- and twenty-first-century philosophy, including Karl-Otto Apel, Philip Pettit, Hilary Putnam, and W.V.O. Quine, through which his treatments of a large range of topics in epistemology and the philosophies of mind and language have been developed and promoted. The chapters in this book—which include contributions from several of Hookway’s former students and colleagues—include studies of Hookway’s engagement with the works of Peirce, James, and Dewey, his contributions to virtue epistemology, and his discussions of hope and pragmatist metaphysics. Pragmatic Reason will be of interest to researchers and advanced students working on American philosophy, the history of analytic philosophy, and epistemology.
Pragmatism and Justice
The essays in this volume answer to anxieties that the pragmatist tradition has had little to say about justice. While both the classical and neo-pragmatist traditions have produced a conspicuously small body of writing about the idea of justice, a common subtext of the essays in this volume is that there is in pragmatist thought a set of valuable resources for developing pragmatist theories of justice, for responding profitably to concrete injustices, and for engaging with contemporary, prevailing, liberal theories of justice. Despite the absence of conventionally philosophical theories of justice in the pragmatist canon, the writings of many pragmatists demonstrate an obvious sensitivity and responsiveness to injustice. Many pragmatists were and are moved by a deep sense of justice-by an awareness of the suffering of people, by the need to build just institutions, and a search for a tolerant and non-discriminatory culture that regards all people as equals. Three related and mutually reinforcing ideas to which virtually all pragmatists are committed can be discerned: a prioritization of concrete problems and real-world injustices ahead of abstract precepts; a distrust of a priori theorizing (along with a corresponding fallibilism and methodological experimentalism); and a deep and persistent pluralism, both in respect to what justice is and requires, and in respect to how real-world injustices are best recognized and remedied. Ultimately, Pragmatism and Justice asserts that pragmatism gives us powerful resources for understanding the idea of justice more clearly and responding more efficaciously to a world rife with injustice.
The Pragmatist Challenge: Pragmatist Metaphysics for Philosophy of Science
The Pragmatist Challenge lays out a programmatic view for taking a pragmatist approach to topics in philosophy of science and metaphysics. Pragmatism involves a collection of specific views as well as comprising a general approach that can be applied to multiple topics. For topics at the intersection of philosophy of science and metaphysics, pragmatism as explored in this volume is an effective way to take entrenched debates and re-frame them in ways that move past old dichotomies and offer more fruitful paths forward. Each chapter explores a dual vision of pragmatism: specific pragmatist views are developed, demonstrating how to take a distinctively pragmatist approach to some particular issue or subfield; and the general shape of what it means to take a pragmatist approach is elucidated as well. The chapters thus tend to be synoptic in scope. Collectively, they offer a new approach that can be taken up in constructively reframing other discussions, ready to be applied to new specific topics. Pragmatism is an especially potent tool that sits at the interface between methodological and applied questions coming directly from sciences, and the underlying ontological or metaphysical commitments that are implied by or support the methodological discussions. The goal of the volume is to articulate a variety of ways to be a pragmatist without having to commit to a single specific set of -isms in order to make use of it, while highlighting the common themes that manifest across different discussions. The chapters offer a heterogenous yet programmatic approach to pragmatism.
Pragmatist Feminism and the Work of Charlene Haddock Seigfried
A contemporary appraisal of the breadth, significance, and legacy of the work of Charlene Haddock Seigfried, this book brings together writings focused on pragmatist feminism/feminist pragmatism, contemporary pragmatism, William James and the reconstruction of philosophy, education and American philosophy in the 21st century. Charlene Haddock Seigfried is a looming figure in American thought and feminist theory who coined the phrase 'pragmatist feminist' which has become an increasingly important concept in contemporary philosophy. Seigfried argues that pragmatism and its rich history is a natural ally for feminism and that the creative combination of these two traditions can pave the way for a genuinely emancipatory feminist practice. Pragmatist Feminism and the Work of Charlene Haddock Seigfried explores and pushes this theory and brings it into conversation with some of the most vibrant strands of current philosophy.
The Prehistory of Mathematical Structuralism (Logic and Computation in Philosophy)
This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. Recently, debates about mathematical structuralism have picked up steam again within the philosophy of mathematics, probing ontological and epistemological issues in novel ways. These debates build on discussions of structuralism which began in the 1960s in the work of philosophers such as Paul Benacerraf and Hilary Putnam; going further than these previous thinkers, however, these new debates also recognize that the motivation for structuralist views should be tied to methodological developments within mathematics. In fact, practically all relevant ideas and methods have roots in the structuralist transformation that modern mathematics underwent in the 19th and early 20th centuries. This edited volume of new essays by top scholars in the philosophy of mathematics explores this previously overlooked 'pre-history' of mathematical structuralism. The contributors explore this historical background along two distinct but interconnected dimensions. First, they reconsider the methodological contributions of major figures in the history of mathematics, such as Dedekind, Hilbert, and Bourbaki, who are responsible for the introduction of new number systems, algebras, and geometries that transformed the landscape of mathematics. Second, they reexamine a range of philosophical reflections by mathematically inclined philosophers, like Russell, Cassirer, and Quine, whose work led to profound conclusions about logical, epistemological, and metaphysical aspects of structuralism. Overall, the essays in this volume show not only that the pre-history of mathematical structuralism is much richer than commonly appreciated, but also that it is crucial to take into account this broader intellectual history for enriching current debates in the philosophy of mathematics. The insights included in this volume will interest scholars and students in the philosophy of mathematics, the philosophy of science, and the history of philosophy.
The Present and Future of Music Law
The music business is a multifaceted, transnational industry that operates within complex and rapidly changing political, economic, cultural and technological contexts. The mode and manner of how music is created, obtained, consumed and exploited is evolving rapidly. It is based on relationships that can be both complimentary and at times confrontational, and around roles that interact, overlap and sometimes merge, reflecting the competing and coinciding interests of creative artists and music industry professionals. It falls to music law and legal practice to provide the underpinning framework to enable these complex relationships to flourish, to provide a means to resolve disputes, and to facilitate commerce in a challenging and dynamic business environment. The Present and Future of Music Law presents thirteen case studies written by experts in their fields, examining a range of key topics at the points where music law and the post-digital music industry intersect, offering a timely exploration of the current landscape and insights into the future shape of the interface between music business and music law.
Principles and Persons: The Legacy of Derek Parfit
Derek Parfit, who died in 2017, is widely believed to have been the most significant moral philosopher in well over a century. The twenty-one new essays in this book have all been inspired by his work. They address issues with which he was concerned in his writing, particularly in his seminal contribution to moral philosophy, Reasons and Persons (OUP, 1984). Rather than simply commenting on his work, these essays attempt to make further progress with issues, both moral and prudential, that Parfit believed matter to our lives: issues concerned with how we ought to live, and what we have most reason to do. Topics covered in the book include the nature of personal identity, the basis of self-interested concern about the future, the rationality of our attitudes toward time, what it is for a life to go well or badly, how to evaluate moral theories, the nature of reasons for action, the aggregation of value, how benefits and harms should be distributed among people, and what degree of sacrifice morality requires us to make for the sake of others. These include some of the most important questions of normative ethical theory, as well as fundamental questions about the metaphysics of personhood and personal identity, and the ways in which the answers to these questions bear on what it is rational and moral for us to do.
Probabilistic Extensions of Various Logical Systems
The contributions in this book survey results on combinations of probabilistic and various other classical, temporal and justification logical systems. Formal languages of these logics are extended with probabilistic operators. The aim is to provide a systematic overview and an accessible presentation of mathematical techniques used to obtain results on formalization, completeness, compactness and decidability. The book will be of value to researchers in logic and it can be used as a supplementary text in graduate courses on non-classical logics.
The Problem of Evil: Eight Views in Dialogue
One of those rare questions in philosophy that is not only technically recalcitrant but also engages the hearts and minds of the broad community is the so-called 'problem of evil': How can the existence of an absolutely perfect God be reconciled with the existence of suffering and evil? This collection of dialogues between eight philosophers of religion explores new ways of thinking about this longstanding problem, in the process reorienting and reinvigorating the philosophical debate around the relationship between God, goodness and evil: How exactly are these three notions connected, if at all? Is God the cause, or author, of evil and suffering? How is the goodness of God to be understood, and how is divine goodness related to human morality? Does God's perfect goodness entail that God must have reasons for permitting or bringing about suffering, and if so what could his reasons be? These questions are of momentous existential and theoretical interest, and they have exercised the finest intellects across the centuries. The time is ripe for a wholesale reconsideration of the problem of evil. To make progress towards this goal, eight distinct perspectives are placed in mutual dialogue, giving voice to both traditional and relatively unorthodox approaches. What emerges from these critical but friendly exchanges is a diversity of fruitful and innovative ways of thinking about the nature of divinity and its relationship to evil.
The Problem of Universals in Early Modern Philosophy
The ancient topic of universals was central to scholastic philosophy, which raised the question of whether universals exist as Platonic forms, as instantiated Aristotelian forms, as concepts abstracted from singular things, or as words that have universal signification. It might be thought that this question lost its importance after the decline of scholasticism in the modern period. However, the fourteen contributions contained in The Problem of Univerals in Early Modern Philosophy indicate that the issue of universals retained its vitality in modern philosophy. Modern philosophers in fact were interested in 3 sets of issues concerning universals: (i) issues concerning the ontological status of universals, (ii) issues concerning the psychology of the formation of universal concepts or terms, and (iii) issues concerning the value and use of universal concepts or terms in the acquisition of knowledge. Chapters in this volume consider the various forms of "Platonism," "conceptualism" and "nominalism" (and distinctive combinations thereof) that emerged from the consideration of such issues in the work of modern philosophers. Furthermore, this volume covers not only the canonical modern figures, namely, Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Locke, Berkeley, Hume and Kant, but also more neglected figures such as Pierre Gassendi, Pierre-Sylvain Regis, Nicolas Malebranche, Henry More, Ralph Cudworth and John Norris.
Problems in Epistemology and Metaphysics: An Introduction to Contemporary Debates
Problems in Epistemology and Metaphysics takes a pro and con approach to two central philosophical topics.Each chapter begins with a question: Can We Have Knowledge? How are Beliefs Justified? What is the mind? Contemporary philosophers with opposing viewpoints are then paired together to argue their position and raise problems with conflicting standpoints. Alongside an up-to-date introduction to a core philosophical stance, each contributor provides a critical response to their opponent and clear explanation of their view. Discussion questions are included at the end of each chapter to guide further discussion.With chapters covering core questions surrounding religious beliefs, scientific knowledge, truth, being and reality, this is a comprehensive introduction to debates lying at the heart of what we know, how we know it and the nature of the world we live in.
Problems in Value Theory: An Introduction to Contemporary Debates
Problems in Value Theory takes a pro and con approach to central topics in aesthetics, ethics and political theory.Each chapter begins with a question: What Makes Actions Right or Wrong? Does Morality Depend on God? Do We Need Government? Contemporary philosophers with opposing viewpoints are then paired together to argue their position and raise problems with conflicting standpoints. Alongside an up-to-date introduction to a core philosophical stance, each contributor provides a critical response to their opponent and clear explanation of their view. Discussion questions are included at the end of each chapter to guide further discussion.With chapters ranging from why the government should never wage war to what is art and does morality depend on God, this introduction covers questions lying at the heart of debates about what does and does not have value.
Proceedings of the 2022 3rd International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Education (Atlantis Highlights in Computer Sciences #9)
This is an open access book.The 2022 3rd International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Education（ICAIE 2022） will be held in Chengdu, China during June 24-26, 2022. The meeting focused on the new trends in the development of "artificial intelligence" and "education" under the new situation, and jointly discussed how to empower and promote the high-quality development of "artificial intelligence" and "education". An ideal platform to share views and experiences with industry experts.The conference invites experts and scholars in the field to conduct wonderful exchanges based on their own research results based on the development of the times. The themes are around artificial intelligence technology and applications; intelligent and knowledge-based systems; information-based education; intelligent learning; advanced information theory and neural network technology ; software computing and algorithms; intelligent algorithms and computing and many other topics.
Process, Action, and Experience
There has been a philosophical upheaval recently in our understanding of the metaphysics of the mind. The philosophy of mind and action has traditionally treated its subject matter as consisting of states and events, and completely ignored the category of ongoing process. So the mental things that happen - experiences and actions - have been taken to be completed events and not ongoing processes. But events by their very nature as completed wholes are never present to the agent or subject; only ongoing processes can be present to a subject in the way required for conscious experience and practical self-knowledge. This suggests that a proper understanding of processes is required to understand subjective experience and agency. This volume explores the possibility and advantages of taking processes to be the subject matter of the philosophy of mind and action. The central defining feature of the process argument is its use of the progressive (as opposed to perfective) aspect. But beyond this, philosophers working on the metaphysics of processes do not agree. The contributors to this volume take up this argument in the metaphysics of processes. Are processes continuants? Are they particulars at all, or should we rather be thinking of process activity as a kind of stuff? Process, Action, and Experience considers whether practical reasoning and practical self-knowledge require thinking of action in process terms, and it considers arguments for the processive nature of conscious experience.
Prophetic Futures
This book is based on the postmedieval journal special issue Prophetic Futures. It calls for renewed attention to prophecy and temporality, challenging in the process critical lenses that adhere to strict dualities of medieval/modern, superstitious/rationalized, and other problematic dyads that occlude our understanding of vatic language. The language, texts, and bodies of prophecy challenge commonplaces about a disenchanted modernity and point the way to new critical approaches to texts out of time. Previously published in postmedieval Volume 10, issue 1, March 2019.
Proust's In Search of Lost Time: Philosophical Perspectives (OXFORD STUDIES IN PHIL AND LIT SERIES)
With the story of a madeleine dipped in tea, Marcel Proust makes famous moments that transport one to an earlier time thought lost forever. His In Search of Lost Time announces a quest narrative with lost time as its goal. We follow the journey of a young man as he strives to become the writer he longs to be, and his journey entails discovering a sense of self in which past and present intertwine. The narrator is delayed in his goal by various digressions, including journeys into the worlds of the salons and of art. For this reason, the novel offers far more avenues for philosophical reflection than simply a meditation on time and identity. In Search of Lost Time includes reflections on love and jealousy, joy and suffering, the enchantments of art and the disillusionments of friendship. This volume brings together prominent philosophers and critics to illuminate these many themes. Eight essays treat a wide range of topics including fiction, biography, temporality, music, love, jealousy, weather, and consciousness. One of the longest and most complex novels ever written, In Search of Lost Time has fascinated philosophers for decades. The contributors in this volume build upon earlier approaches to offer new avenues and directions for philosophical thought.
Psychology and Value in Plato, Aristotle, and Hellenistic Philosophy: The Ninth Keeling Colloquium in Ancient Philosophy
Ancient Greek thought saw the birth, in Western philosophy, of the study now known as moral psychology. In its broadest sense, moral psychology encompasses the study of those aspects of human psychology relevant to our moral lives—desire, emotion, ethical knowledge, practical moral reasoning, and moral imagination—and their role in apprehending or responding to sources of value. This volume draws together contributions from leading international scholars in ancient philosophy, exploring central issues in the moral psychology of Plato, Aristotle, and the Hellenistic schools. Through a series of chapters and responses, these contributions challenge and develop interpretations of ancient views on topics from Socratic intellectualism to the nature of appetitive desires and their relation to goodness, from the role of pleasure and pain in virtue, to our capacities for memory, anticipation and choice and their role in practical action, to the question of the sufficiency or otherwise of the virtues for a flourishing human life.
Purpose and Procedure in Philosophy of Perception
Contemporary philosophy of perception is dominated by highly polarized debates. The polarization is particularly acute in the debate between naïve realist disjunctivists and their opponents, but divisions seem almost as stark in other areas of dispute, for example, the debate over whether we experience so-called 'high-level' properties, and the debate concerning individuation of the senses. The guiding hypothesis underlying this volume is that such polarization stems from insufficient attention to how we should go about settling these debates. In general, there is widespread, largely implicit disagreement concerning what philosophical theories of perception are supposed to explain, the claims that we should hold fixed in the course of theorizing, and the methods that such theorizing should employ. The goal of this volume is to move such methodological questions from the background to the front of the debate, in the hope of facilitating progress. The contributions constitute an initial effort to spur more explicit, systematic discussion of methodology in philosophy of perception, covering a wide range of relevant topics, from the relation between scientific and philosophical theorizing about perception, to lessons we can learn from the history of philosophy of perception.
The Quest for the Good Life: Ancient Philosophers on Happiness
How should I live? How can I be happy? What is happiness, really? These are perennial questions, which in recent times have become the object of diverse kinds of academic research. Ancient philosophers placed happiness at the centre of their thought, and we can trace the topic through nearly a millennium. While the centrality of the notion of happiness in ancient ethics is well known, this book is unique in that it focuses directly on this notion, as it appears in the ancient texts. Fourteen papers by an international team of scholars map the various approaches and conceptions found from the Pre-Socratics through Plato, Aristotle, Hellenistic Philosophy, to the Neo-Platonists and Augustine in late antiquity. While not promising a formula that can guarantee a greater share in happiness to the reader, the book addresses questions raised by ancient thinkers that are still of deep concern to many people today: Do I have to be a morally good person in order to be happy? Are there purely external criteria for happiness such as success according to received social norms or is happiness merely a matter of an internal state of the person? How is happiness related to the stages of life and generally to time? In this book the reader will find an informed discussion of these and many other questions relating to happiness.
Questions About God: Today's Philosophers Ponder the Divine
From young children, with their guileless, searching questions, to the recently bereaved, trying to make sense of tragic loss, humans wrestle with our relationship to God--and with God's essence, motivations, and power--throughout our lives: Why does God permit catastrophe and senseless tragedy, again and again? Is God's power limited in any way? Can He change the past? Does He know the future? Why does God require prayer? Why does He not provide stronger evidence of His presence? Whom does God consign to hell, and why? Does God change? Suffer? What can we make of the conflicting diversity within world religions, of the many gods of different religious traditions? Such questions engage, confront, and perplex us on a daily basis. In this rich, concise volume, leading philosophers who have long pondered God's nature and ways take on these core problems and present their findings in a manner likely to engage believer and non-believer, general reader and specialist alike.