Spinoza’s Metaphysics of Substance: The Substance-Mode Relation as a Relation of Inherence and Prediction

In his groundbreaking work of 1969, Spinoza's Metaphysics: An Essay in Interpretation, Edwin Curley attacked the traditional understanding of the substance-mode relation in Spinoza, which makes modes inhere in the substance. Curley argued that such an interpretation generates insurmountable problems, as had been already claimed by Pierre Bayle in his famous entry on Spinoza. Instead of having the modes inhere in the substance Curley suggested that the modes’ dependence upon the substance should be interpreted in terms of (efficient) causation, i.e., as committing Spinoza to nothing over and above the claim that the substance is the (efficient) cause of the modes. These bold and fascinating claims generated one of the most important scholarly controversies in Spinoza scholarship of the past thirty-five years. In this chapter I argue against Curley’s interpretation and attempt to reestablish the traditional understanding of Spinozistic modes as inhering in God and as predicated of God. I also criticize Curley’s philosophical motivation for suggesting this interpretation. I do believe, however, that Curley is right about the existence of an intimate connection between the substance-mode relation and causation in Spinoza. In the next chapter I will study the notion of ‘immanent cause’, which merges efficient causality and inherence. I will clarify the relation between immanent, efficient and material causation, and show where precisely Spinoza diverged from the traditional Aristotelian taxonomy of causes. In the second chapter I also discuss the German Idealists’ view of Spinoza as an ‘acosmist’. Under this interpretation Spinoza was a modern reviver of Eleatic monism, who allegedly asserts the mere existence of God, and denies the reality of the world of particular things. Spinozistic modes - according to this reading - are nothing but passing and unreal phenomena. Though this view of Spinoza as an ‘acosmist’ can be supported by some lines in Spinoza’s thought, I believe it should be rejected since it is not consistent with some of the most central doctrines of the Ethics. In the final part of the second chapter I discuss the relation between modes and the attributes under which they fall, and suggest a terminological distinction between a ‘mode of God’ (i.e., a mode under all attributes) and a ‘mode of an attribute’ (i.e., a mode under a specific attribute), a distinction which can help us avoid some common confusions in the treatment of the issue

Adding reference immutability to Java

Thesis (M. Eng.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2006.Includes bibliographical references (leaves 129-133).This paper describes a programming language, Javari, that is capable of expressing and enforcing immutability constraints. The specific constraint expressed is that the abstract state of the object to which an immutable reference refers cannot be modified using that reference. The abstract state is (part of) the transitively reachable state: that is, the state of the object and all state reachable from it by following references. The type system permits explicitly excluding fields from the abstract state of an object. For a statically type-safe language, the type system guarantees reference immutability. The type system is distinguishes the notions of assignability and mutability; integrates with Java's generic types and with multi-dimensional arrays; provides a mutability polymorphism approach to avoiding code duplication; and has type-safe support for reflection and serialization. This paper describes a core calculus including formal type rules for the language. Additionally, this paper describes a type inference algorithm that can be used convert existing Java programs to Javari. Experimental results from a prototype implementation of the algorithm are presented.by Matthew S. Tschantz.M.Eng

Ontological Representation of Light Wave Camera Data to Support Vision-Based AmI

This article belongs to the Special Issue Sensors and Wireless Sensor Networks for Novel Concepts of Things, Interfaces and Applications in Smart SpacesRecent advances in technologies for capturing video data have opened a vast amount of new application areas in visual sensor networks. Among them, the incorporation of light wave cameras on Ambient Intelligence (AmI) environments provides more accurate tracking capabilities for activity recognition. Although the performance of tracking algorithms has quickly improved, symbolic models used to represent the resulting knowledge have not yet been adapted to smart environments. This lack of representation does not allow to take advantage of the semantic quality of the information provided by new sensors. This paper advocates for the introduction of a part-based representational level in cognitive-based systems in order to accurately represent the novel sensors' knowledge. The paper also reviews the theoretical and practical issues in part-whole relationships proposing a specific taxonomy for computer vision approaches. General part-based patterns for human body and transitive part-based representation and inference are incorporated to an ontology-based previous framework to enhance scene interpretation in the area of video-based AmI. The advantages and new features of the model are demonstrated in a Social Signal Processing (SSP) application for the elaboration of live market researches.This work was supported in part by Projects CICYT TIN2011-28620-C02-01, CICYT TEC2011-28626-C02-02, CAM CONTEXTS (S2009/TIC-1485) and DPS2008-07029-C02-02.Publicad

Characterizing Implementations that Preserve Properties of Concurrent Randomized Algorithms

We show that correctness criteria of concurrent algorithms are mathematically equivalent to the existence of so-called simulations between implementations of the algorithms in a well-known framework (that of input/output automata) and simple canonical automata. This equivalence allows us to frame our proofs of correctness in a language much more amenable to machine-checking than conventional proofs. We give the first demonstration that when strongly linearizable implementations of randomized concurrent algorithms are utilized, then the distributions of a well-defined class of random variables are preserved under object substitution by non-concurrent implementations of the same algorithms. We also consider weaker conditions than strong linearizability under which implementations are still correct in the presence of randomization

Improving Object-Oriented Programming by Integrating Language Features to Support Immutability

Nowadays developers consider Object-Oriented Programming (OOP) the de-facto general programming paradigm. While successful, OOP is not without problems. In 1994, Gamma et al. published a book with a set of 23 design patterns addressing recurring problems found in OOP software. These patterns are well-known in the industry and are taught in universities as part of software engineering curricula. Despite their usefulness in solving recurring problems, these design patterns bring a certain complexity in their implementation. That complexity is influenced by the features available in the implementation language. In this thesis, we want to decrease this complexity by focusing on the problems that design patterns attempt to solve and the language features that can be used to solve them. Thus, we aim to investigate the impact of specific language features on OOP and contribute guidelines to improve OOP language design. We first perform a mapping study to catalogue the language features that have been proposed in the literature to improve design pattern implementations. From those features, we focus on investigating the impact of immutability-related features on OOP. We then perform an exploratory study measuring the impact of introducing immutability in OOP software with the objective of establishing the advantages and drawbacks of using immutability in the context of OOP. Results indicate that immutability may produce more granular and easier-to-understand programs. We also perform an experiment to measure the impact of new language features added into the C\# language for better immutability support. Results show that these specific language features facilitate developers' tasks when aiming to implement immutability in OOP. We finally present a new design pattern aimed at solving a problem with method overriding in the context of immutable hierarchies of objects. We discuss the impact of language features on the implementations of this pattern by comparing these implementations in different programming languages, including Clojure, Java, and Kotlin. Finally, we implement these language features as a language extension to Common Lisp and discuss their usage

The Simplicity of Divine Ideas: Theistic Conceptual Realism and The Doctrine of Divine Simplicity

There has been little discussion of the compatibility of Theistic Conceptual Realism (TCR) with the doctrine of divine simplicity (DDS). On one hand, if a plurality of universals is necessary to explain the character of particular things, there is reason to think this commits the proponent of TCR to the existence of a plurality of divine concepts. So the proponent of the DDS has a prima facie reason to reject TCR (and vice versa). On the other hand, many mediaeval philosophers accept both the existence of divine ideas and the DDS. In this paper I draw on Mediaeval and contemporary accounts of properties and divine simplicity to argue that the two theories are not logically incompatible