A Medieval Treasure: The Story of a Hoard of Chess Pieces

On an island that is still inhabited today, a hidden stash of chess pieces was discovered. The finding of these gaming pieces was by no means commonplace because there were several dozen pieces and they were all intricately carved. The chess pieces are rare because they were made completely out of solid walrus tusks and five were made from whale\u27s teeth. The original story behind the chess pieces is not clearly obtained. There are different stories ranging from an escaping sailor hiding the chessmen to a travelling merchant leaving them behind. Without knowing who the original owner of the chess collection was, we can hypothesize that the pieces were obtained with a considerable amount of wealth. The ninety three piece hoard would have required the skill of a master carver as well as a decent amount of time for completion. The chessmen were allegedly found in 1831 A.D. by a wondering peasant. Scholars debate about who found the collection and where exactly they found it. Most believe that the pieces were found on the Bay of Uig on the Isle of Lewis located in what is today the Scottish Hebrides. The Lewis chessmen are one of the most unique chess collections that exist because of their age, composition, the intricate nature of the carvings, and the size of the collection. It is important to study objects from different time periods because it can tell us about aspects of culture and the role that the objects had in the society. The Lewis chess pieces show aspects of Scandinavian culture and represent the influence of gaming in Medieval society

Composition and the Logic of Location: An Argument for Regionalism

Ned Markosian has recently defended a new theory of composition, which he calls regionalism : some material objects xx compose something if and only if there is a material object located at the fusion of the locations of xx. Markosian argues that regionalism follows from what he calls the subregion theory of parthood. Korman and Carmichael agree. We provide countermodels to show that regionalism does not follow from, even together with fourteen potentially implicit background principles. We then show that regionalism does follow from five of those background principles together with and two additional principles connecting parthood and location, which we call and. While the additional principles are not uncontroversial, our conjecture is that many will find them attractive. We conclude by mentioning that fills a previously unnoticed gap in the formal theory of location presented in Parsons

Numbers, Empiricism and the A Priori

The present paper deals with the ontological status of numbers and considers Frege ́s proposal in Grundlagen upon the background of the Post-Kantian semantic turn in analytical philosophy. Through a more systematic study of his philosophical premises, it comes to unearth a first level paradox that would unset earlier still than it was exposed by Russell. It then studies an alternative path, that departin1g from Frege’s initial premises, drives to a conception of numbers as synthetic a priori in a more Kantian sense. On this basis, it tentatively explores a possible derivation of basic logical rules on their behalf, suggesting a more rudimentary basis to inferential thinking, which supports reconsidering the difference between logical thinking and AI. Finally, it reflects upon the contributions of this approach to the problem of the a priori

Giants and loops in beta-deformed theories

We study extended objects in the gravity dual of the N=1 beta-deformation of N=4 Super Yang-Mills theory. We identify probe brane configurations corresponding to giant gravitons and Wilson loops. In particular we identify a new class of objects, given by D5-branes wrapped on a two-torus with a world-volume gauge field strength turned on along the torus. These appear when the deformation parameter assumes a rational value and the gauge theory spectrum has additional branches of vacua. We give an interpretation of the new D5-brane dual giant gravitons in terms of rotating vacuum expectation values in these additional branches.Comment: 26 pages; typos corrected, published versio