"Self-Knowledge and the Science of the Soul in Buridan's Quaestiones De Anima"

Buridan holds that the proper subject of psychology (i.e., the science undertaken in Aristotle’s De Anima) is the soul, its powers, and characteristic functions. But, on his view, the science of psychology should not be understood as including the body nor even the soul-body composite as its proper subject. Rather its subject is just “the soul in itself and its powers and functions insofar as they stand on the side of the soul". Buridan takes it as obvious that, even thus narrowly construed, such a science is possible. To the extent that this science includes the human or intellective soul, however, Buridan’s claim regarding its possibility is far from obvious. After all, like most of his contemporaries, Buridan takes the human soul to be immaterial. Thus, he readily admits that “the intellect cannot be sensed” and its operations are likewise inaccessible to the senses. Yet, on Buridan's broadly empiricist theory of knowledge, all (human) knowledge, including knowledge of the intellect or intellective soul, takes its start in the senses. How, then, is a science of the human soul possible? What is the nature or source of our knowledge of the intellect? In this paper, I reconstruct Buridan's answer to these questions. My discussion divides roughly into two parts. In the first, I set out the main elements of Buridan’s account of how we come to cognize the intellect, focusing on what he says about the genesis of our concept of the intellect. I then consider his account of our cognition of our own intellective states. As the discussion in part one make clear, Buridan holds that our concepts of intellect and of intellective states are both derived (inferentially) from subjective “experience” of our own states and rational activities. In part two, therefore, I try to elucidate Buridan’s notion of experience. Ultimately, I argue that it is a non-conceptual, non-discursive mode of self-awareness. I suggest, moreover, that it might best be understood in terms of our own notion of phenomenal consciousness. On the interpretation I advance, then, it turns out that, for Buridan, our concept of the intellect itself and, hence, the science of (human) psychology in general, is ultimately grounded in phenomenal experience of our own intellective states

Method of Calibration for a Large Cathetometer System

A method of calibration has been devised for a pair of mutually orthogonal two-axis cathetometers that, when used together, yield measurements of three-dimensional positions of objects mounted on an optical bench. Each cathetometer has a horizontal travel of 1.8 m and a vertical travel of 1.2 m. The cathetometers are required to measure X, Y, and Z coordinates (see figure) to within plus or minus 0.005 in. (plus or minus 0.127 mm). Each cathetometer consists of an alignment telescope on a platform mounted on a two-dimensional translation stage. The knowledge required for calibration of each cathetometer is (1) the two-dimensional position of the cathetometer platform as a function of the electronic readouts of position encoders on the translation stage and (2) the amount of any angular misalignment (roll, pitch, and/or yaw) of the cathetometer platform as a function of the two-dimensional coordinates or the position-encoder readouts. By use of three equations derived from the applicable trigonometric relationships, the calibrated X, Y, and Z coordinates can be computed from the raw encoder readouts

Advanced technology for minimum weight pressure vessel system

Bosses were made of fiber/resin composite materials to evaluate their potential in lightweight pressure vessels. An approximate 25% weight savings over the standard aluminum boss was achieved without boss failures during burst tests. Polymer liners and metal liners are used in fiber composite pressure vessels for containment of gases. The internal support of these liners required during the filament winding process has previously been provided by dissolvable salt mandrels. An internal pressurization technique has been developed which allows overwinding the liner without other means of support and without collapse. Study was made of several additional concepts including styrene/Saran, styrene/flexible epoxy

Sagnac effect in a chain of mesoscopic quantum rings

The ability to interferometrically detect inertial rotations via the Sagnac effect has been a strong stimulus for the development of atom interferometry because of the potential 10^{10} enhancement of the rotational phase shift in comparison to optical Sagnac gyroscopes. Here we analyze ballistic transport of matter waves in a one dimensional chain of N coherently coupled quantum rings in the presence of a rotation of angular frequency, \Omega. We show that the transmission probability, T, exhibits zero transmission stop gaps as a function of the rotation rate interspersed with regions of rapidly oscillating finite transmission. With increasing N, the transition from zero transmission to the oscillatory regime becomes an increasingly sharp function of \Omega with a slope \partialT/\partial \Omega N^2. The steepness of this slope dramatically enhances the response to rotations in comparison to conventional single ring interferometers such as the Mach-Zehnder and leads to a phase sensitivity well below the standard quantum limit