EINSTEINS 1905 REVOLUTIONARY PAPER ON QUANTA AS A MANIFEST AND DETAILED EXAMPLE OF A PRINCIPLE THEORY

In the last times some scholars tried to characterize Einsteins distinction between constructive i.e. deductive - theories and principle theories, the latter ones being preferred by Einstein. Here this distinction is qualified by an accurate inspection on past physical theories. Some previous theories are surely non-deductive theories. By a mutual comparison of them a set of features - mainly the arguing according to non-classical logic - are extracted. They manifest a new ideal model of organising a theory. Einsteins paper of 1905 on quanta, qualified by him as a principle theory, is interpreted according to this model of theory. Some unprecedented characteristic features are manifested. At the beginning of the same paper Einstein declared one more dichotomy about the kind of mathematics in theoretical physics. These two dichotomies are recognised as representing the foundations of theoretical physics. With respect to these dichotomies the choices by Einstein in the paper on quanta are the alternative choices to Newtons ones. This fact gives reason to the revolutionary nature that Einstein attributed to his paper

Logic, dialectics, politics : some recent controversies

RevCover titleSeries from publisher's listIncludes bibliographical references"Revised June 1980."Facilitated by the National Science Foundation. 780670

A Tale of Two Formalisms: How Law and Economics Mirrors Originalism and Textualism

Two leading schools of thought among U.S. conservative legal elites — Law and Economics (L&E) and Originalism and Textualism (O&T) — both purport to use their formalist structures to guide analysis in ways that are objective, substantially determinate, and apolitical. Because they rest on very different theoretical underpinnings, L&E and O&T should only randomly reach similar policy or legal conclusions. After all, L&E implements neoclassical economics, a theory of utility maximization, whereas O&T is a theory of semantics. Yet as practiced, L&E and O&T rarely result in conflict. What explains the missing intra-conservative clash? Despite their respective pretenses to objectivity, determinacy, and political neutrality, neither theory delivers on its promises. Economic efficiency, the lynchpin of L&E, is incoherent because it relies on typically hidden but ultimately normative assumptions about preferences that would exist in an impossible world without law. O&T as it has been refined in response to devastating criticisms of earlier versions is indistinguishable from ostensibly less determinate rivals like Living Constitutionalism and purposivism. Accordingly, conservatives use L&E and O&T to obscure the role of normative priors, perhaps even from themselves. Liberals could use the same techniques for different results but heretofore generally have not, instead mostly settling for counterpunching against charges of result-orientation

On Argumentation Logic and Propositional Logic

This paper studies the relationship between Argumentation Logic (AL), a recently defined logic based on the study of argumentation in AI, and classical Propositional Logic (PL). In particular, it shows that AL and PL are logically equivalent in that they have the same entailment relation from any given classically consistent theory. This equivalence follows from a correspondence between the non-acceptability of (arguments for) sentences in AL and Natural Deduction (ND) proofs of the complement of these sentences. The proof of this equivalence uses a restricted form of ND proofs, where hypotheses in the application of the Reductio of Absurdum inference rule are required to be “relevant” to the absurdity derived in the rule. The paper also discusses how the argumentative re-interpretation of PL could help control the application of ex-falso quodlibet in the presence of inconsistencies

Inference Rules and the Meaning of the Logical Constants

The dissertation provides an analysis and elaboration of Michael Dummett's proof-theoretic notions of validity. Dummett's notions of validity are contrasted with standard proof-theoretic notions and formally evaluated with respect to their adequacy to propositional intuitionistic logic

"And There See Justice Done": The Problem of Law in the African American Literary Tradition

This dissertation argues that careful attention to African American literature reveals that the different terms through which we understand race and law are in fact incommensurable, and that the clash of their competing logics constitutes a fundamental, and unremarked upon, organizing theme of the black literary tradition. The law's relationship with its racialized subjects - and its troubled and troubling relationship with African Americans in particular - emblematizes this collision of radically different perspectives. The meaning of equality and freedom, for instance, are ideas often understood in radically different terms by the law and by the literature that critiques it. The rupture produced by this divergence is revealed in the competing texts of the two cultures: on the one hand, in legal disputes and legal texts, in laws and in the deliberations out of which they are constructed; and on the other, in the cultural productions of the African American community, and in particular in its rich tradition of letters. Reading a broad range of works across that tradition, from the earliest slave petitions to the contemporary novel, I offer a new way to understand the relationship between the law, the African American experience of the law, and the texts that narrate their fundamental disjuncture. Showing that African American literature actually begins with the law, I first investigate the transition of black writing from legal petitions and pamphlets to more literary forms at the end of the eighteenth century. These first black narratives anticipate the inevitable failure of their more legalistic counterparts to remedy injustice, and instead cast their critiques of the law in metaphor. My project then reads both canonical and less-celebrated texts across the entire tradition of African American letters - from Equiano's 1789 Interesting Narrative to Edward Jones' 2003 The Known World - to show that the formal and figurative elements of much of the tradition of African American writing are in fact premised in the law: unexpected and repeated scenes of madness and incompetence attack the illogic of slavery; literary portrayals of black traitors reveal the fundamental tension between black loyalty to the nation and the nation's betrayal of the race; the passing narrative satirizes white anxiety about the law's inability to police the color line; the figure of blindness belies a twenty-first century critique of the law's own colorblindness. And finally, I develop the larger claim that theorizing the rupture between these legal and literary texts can help us to solidify the coherence of an African American literary tradition that is increasingly understood as fractured, and simultaneously resist the law's compulsion to universalize the particular narratives of its many diverse subjects

An axiomatic approach for persuasion dialogs

International audienceSeveral systems were developed for supporting public persuasion dialogs where two agents with conflicting opinions try to convince an audience. For computing the outcomes of dialogs, these systems use (abstract or structured) argumentation systems that were initially developed for nonmonotonic reasoning. Despite the increasing number of such systems, there are almost no work on high level properties they should satisfy. This paper is a first attempt for defining postulates that guide the well-definition of dialog systems and that allow their comparison. We propose six basic postulates (including e.g. the finiteness of generated dialogs). We then show that this set of postulates is incompatible with those proposed for argumentation systems devoted for nonmonotonic reasoning. This incompatibility confirms the differences between persuading and reasoning. It also suggests that reasoning systems are not suitable for computing the outcomes of dialogs

Auto-Presentation of My Philosophy

Philosophical Autobiography. I fell in love with philosophy very early. A decisive event and great gift in my life was that the great philosopher Dietrich von Hildebrand, one of the most outspoken intellectual enemies of Nazi ideology,1 was a close friend of my parents and visited our house regularly from 1948 on, when he first returned to Europe. I was then only three years old. 2 After having had to flee Germany in 1933 and Austria in 1938, when the Nazis invaded Austria and sent immediately their death squad to his apartment in Vienna, from where he had fought Nazi ideology in Austria 1933-1938, in order to murder him, he emigrated first to Switzerland, then to France, and finally to the US (New York). Due to his unique, kind, brilliant mind, and radiant, loving and joyful personality, I discovered his unique lovability and loved him deeply already as a child. At twelve years of age, when passing through a kind of philosophical and religious crisis due to my contact with young relativists, materialists, and atheists, Hildebrand’s philosophical lectures and discussions with young people and adults in our home provided me with a strong antidote against these errors. At the same age, I read Hildebrand’s most difficult book Metaphysik der Gemeinschaft, and he assured me in our conversations that I had understood it very well

Synchronous Online Philosophy Courses: An Experiment in Progress

There are two main ways to teach a course online: synchronously or asynchronously. In an asynchronous course, students can log on at their convenience and do the course work. In a synchronous course, there is a requirement that all students be online at specific times, to allow for a shared course environment. In this article, the author discusses the strengths and weaknesses of synchronous online learning for the teaching of undergraduate philosophy courses. The author discusses specific strategies and technologies he uses in the teaching of online philosophy courses. In particular, the author discusses how he uses videoconferencing to create a classroom-like environment in an online class