Bøger i Synthese Library serien

Selected Conributed Papers from the 11th International Congress of Logic, Methodology, and Philosophy of Science, Krakow, 1999

Borders enclose and separate us. We assign to them tremendous significance. Along them we draw supposedly uncrossable boundaries within which we believe our individual identities begin and end, erecting the metaphysical dividing walls that enclose each one of us into numerically identical, numerically distinct, entities: persons. Do the borders between us - physical, psychological, neurological, causal, spatial, temporal, etc. - merit the metaphysical significance ordinarily accorded them? The central thesis of I Am You is that our borders do not signify boundaries between persons. We are all the same person. Variations on this heretical theme have been voiced periodically throughout the ages (the Upanishads, Averroës, Giordano Bruno, Josiah Royce, Schrödinger, Fred Hoyle, Freeman Dyson). In presenting his arguments, the author relies on detailed analyses of recent formal work on personal identity, especially that of Derek Parfit, Sydney Shoemaker, Robert Nozick, David Wiggins, Daniel C. Dennett and Thomas Nagel, while incorporating the views of Descartes, Leibniz, Wittgenstein, Schopenhauer, Kant, Husserl and Brouwer. His development of the implied moral theory is inspired by, and draws on, Rawls, Sidgwick, Kant and again Parfit. The traditional, commonsense view that we are each a separate person numerically identical to ourselves over time, i.e., that personal identity is closed under known individuating and identifying borders - what the author calls Closed Individualism - is shown to be incoherent. The demonstration that personal identity is not closed but open points collectively in one of two new directions: either there are no continuously existing, self-identical persons over time in the sense ordinarily understood - the sort of view developed by philosophers as diverse as Buddha, Hume and most recently Derek Parfit, what the author calls Empty Individualism - or else you are everyone, i.e., personal identity is notclosed under known individuating and identifying borders, what the author calls Open Individualism. In making his case, the author: - offers a new explanation both of consciousness and of self-consciousness - constructs a new theory of Self - explains psychopathologies (e.g. multiple personality disorder, schizophrenia) - shows Open Individualism to be the best competing explanation of who we are - provides the metaphysical foundations for global ethics. The book is intended for philosophers and the philosophically inclined - physicists, mathematicians, psychiatrists, psychologists, linguists, computer scientists, economists, and communication theorists. It is accessible to graduate students and advanced undergraduates.

IN MEMORIAM OF ARTUR ROJSZCZAK For a teacher, the opportunity to write the Foreword to a student's work gives rise to a sense offul?lment and pride. In this case, however, although the latter remains, the former has been effaced.Inawell-ordered world Artur Rojszczak would have perhaps one day written tributes to ourselves.

Having said this, I still think that there is a common theme to my work over the years: The dynamics of thought. My academic interests have all the time dealt with aspects of how different kinds of knowledge should be represented, and, in particular, how changes in knowledge will affect thinking.

Self-organization constitutes one of the most important theoretical debates in contemporary life sciences. The present book explores the relevance of the concept of self-organization and its impact on such scientific fields as: immunology, neurosciences, ecology and theories of evolution.Historical aspects of the issue are also broached. Intuitions relative to self-organization can be found in the works of such key western philosophical figures as Aristotle, Leibniz and Kant. Interacting with more recent authors and cybernetics, self-organization represents a notion in keeping with the modern world's discovery of radical complexity.The themes of teleology and emergence are analyzed by philosophers of sciences with regards to the issues of modelization and scientific explanation.The implications of self-organization for life sciences are here approached from an interdisciplinary angle, revealing the notion as already rewarding and full of promise for the future.

This volume collects some of the most significant papers of Arthur Pap. Pap's writings in philosophy of science, modality, and philosophy of mathematics provide insightful alternative perspectives on philosophical problems of current interest.

This book explores the conditions under which someone may be deemed blameworthy for holding a particular belief, drawing on contemporary epistemology, ethics and legal scholarship.

This collection presents contemporary Polish work in philosophical logic which in many respects continue the Polish way of doing philosophical logic. This book will be of interest to logicians, mathematicians, philosophers, and linguists.

Discussions of the foundations of mathematics and their history are frequently restricted to logical issues in a narrow sense, or else to traditional problems of analytic philosophy.

Axiomatic Formal Ontology is a fairly comprehensive systematic treatise on general metaphysics. Its main theme is the construction of a general non-set-theoretical theory of intensional entities. Other important matters discussed are the metaphysics of modality, the nature of actual existence, mereology and the taxonomy of entities.

Intentionality is one of the most frequently discussed topics in contemporary phenomenology and analytic philosophy. This book investigates intentionality from the point of view of intentional objects. On the one hand, M-logic is used as a tool for investigating formal features of intentional objects.

The IOth International Congress of Logic, Methodology and Philosophy of Science, which took place in Florence in August 1995, offered a vivid and comprehensive picture of the present state of research in all directions of Logic and Philosophy of Science.

Recursive Functions and Metamathematics deals with problems of the completeness and decidability of theories, using as its main tool the theory of recursive functions. Recent results and trends have been included, such as undecidable sentences of mathematical content, reverse mathematics.

Mathematics has stood as a bridge between the Humanities and the Sciences since the days of classical antiquity. In the Critique ofPure Reason, mathematics is one of the transcendental instruments the human mind uses to apprehend nature, and by apprehending to construct it under the universal and necessary lawsofNewtonian mechanics.

A comprehensive survey of Martin-Loef's constructive type theory, considerable parts of which have only been presented by Martin-Loef in lecture form or as part of conference talks. Readership: Comprehensive accounts of the history and philosophy of constructive type theory and a considerable amount of related material.

Symposion Proceedings, San Servolo, Venice, Italy, May 16-22, 1999

This is a selection of essays written by leading representatives in the fields of action theory and philosophy of mind, philosophy of the social sciences and especially the nature of social action, and of epistemology and philosophy of science.

In Representational Ideas: From Plato to Patricia Churchland Watson argues that all intelligible theories of representation by ideas are based on likeness between representations and objects.

Patrick Suppes is a philosopher and scientist whose contributions range over probability and statistics, mathematical and experimental psychology, the foundations of physics, education theory, the philosophy of language, measurement theory, and the philosophy of science.

In this book, I deal with some fundamental problems of the Hegelian dialectic. Becker's thinking, from an external point of view, that is, from a formal, empirical or existential contemporary angle, I try to determine the extent to which we may legitimately talk about the fruitfulness of Hegelian dialectic.

Prior's view on intensionality and truth is based on the principle that sentences never name, that what sentences say cannot be otherwise signified, that a sentence says what it says whatever the type of its occurrence, and that sentential quantification is neither eliminable, substitutional, nor referential.

Reasoning about Preference Dynamics explores what it takes for logical systems to deal with information dynamics and preference change in an integrated way. The text covers all aspects of reasoning and agency, while providing a framework accessible to readers from various fields.

Exploring the logic behind applied mathematics to the physical world, this volume illustrates how radical naturalism, nominalism and strict finitism can account for the applications of classical mathematics in current theories about natural phenomena.

This book presents the classic relative consistency proofs in set theory that are obtained by the device of 'inner models'. Chapters I and II introduce the axioms of set theory, and develop such parts of the theory as are indispensable for every relative consistency proof;

According to a view assumed by many scientists and philosophers of science and standardly found in science textbooks, it is controlled ex perience which provides the basis for distinguishing between acceptable and unacceptable theories in science: acceptable theories are those which can pass empirical tests.

This collection contains studies on justice, juridical reasoning and argumenta tion which contributed to my ideas on the new rhetoric.