springer netherlands sep 1977 (16 results)

Buch. Condition: Neu. This item is printed on demand - it takes 3-4 days longer - Neuware -I With the immense success of modem science it has generally become accepted that the only way to acquire knowledge is by the use of the method uniformly practiced by working scientists. Consequently, the credibility of the claims of religion, which seem to be based on belief in revelation, tradition, authority and the like, have been considerably shaken. In the face of the serious threat provided by the ascendancy of modem scientific method ology, religious thinkers have adopted various defensive attitudes. Some have retreated into an extreme position where Theism is completely safe from any attack on it by the use of empirical methods of inquiry, maintaining that contrary to appearances, religion makes no factual claims whatsoever. To be religious, they say, is to subscribe to a certain value system; it is to adopt a set of practices and a given attitude to the meaning and purpose of life without making any assertions about this or that empirical feature of the universe. Others wishing to remain more faithful to what religion traditionally meant throughout the ages, agree that Theism does make factual claims but that these are so radically different from the kind of claims made by science that it is only right that they should be established by a separate method on its own. In matters of faith reliance on widely entrenched tradition and sacred authority is not objectionable according to some. 212 pp. Englisch.

Taschenbuch. Condition: Neu. This item is printed on demand - it takes 3-4 days longer - Neuware -This book grew out of previously published papers of mine composed over a period of years; they have been reworked (sometimes beyond recognition) so as to form a reasonably coherent whole. Part One treats of informative inference. I argue (Chapter 2) that the traditional principle of induction in its clearest formulation (that laws are confirmed by their positive cases) is clearly false. Other formulations in terms of the 'uniformity of nature' or the 'resemblance of the future to the past' seem to me hopelessly unclear. From a Bayesian point of view, 'learning from experience' goes by conditionalization (Bayes' rule). The traditional stum bling block for Bayesians has been to fmd objective probability inputs to conditionalize upon. Subjective Bayesians allow any probability inputs that do not violate the usual axioms of probability. Many subjectivists grant that this liberality seems prodigal but own themselves unable to think of additional constraints that might plausibly be imposed. To be sure, if we could agree on the correct probabilistic representation of 'ignorance' (or absence of pertinent data), then all probabilities obtained by applying Bayes' rule to an 'informationless' prior would be objective. But familiar contra dictions, like the Bertrand paradox, are thought to vitiate all attempts to objectify 'ignorance'. BuUding on the earlier work of Sir Harold Jeffreys, E. T. Jaynes, and the more recent work ofG. E. P. Box and G. E. Tiao, I have elected to bite this bullet. In Chapter 3, I develop and defend an objectivist Bayesian approach. 288 pp. Englisch.

Taschenbuch. Condition: Neu. This item is printed on demand - it takes 3-4 days longer - Neuware -I With the immense success of modem science it has generally become accepted that the only way to acquire knowledge is by the use of the method uniformly practiced by working scientists. Consequently, the credibility of the claims of religion, which seem to be based on belief in revelation, tradition, authority and the like, have been considerably shaken. In the face of the serious threat provided by the ascendancy of modem scientific method ology, religious thinkers have adopted various defensive attitudes. Some have retreated into an extreme position where Theism is completely safe from any attack on it by the use of empirical methods of inquiry, maintaining that contrary to appearances, religion makes no factual claims whatsoever. To be religious, they say, is to subscribe to a certain value system; it is to adopt a set of practices and a given attitude to the meaning and purpose of life without making any assertions about this or that empirical feature of the universe. Others wishing to remain more faithful to what religion traditionally meant throughout the ages, agree that Theism does make factual claims but that these are so radically different from the kind of claims made by science that it is only right that they should be established by a separate method on its own. In matters of faith reliance on widely entrenched tradition and sacred authority is not objectionable according to some. 216 pp. Englisch.

Taschenbuch. Condition: Neu. This item is printed on demand - it takes 3-4 days longer - Neuware -From the point of view of individual consumer there are too many scientific papers being produced and published every year, too many to be looked up in the tremendous and steadi Iy increasing number and volume of scientific periodicals and proceedings from allover the world. This is not only the result of the 'publish or perish' law, but also - let us hope mainly - the result of the increasing amount of true scientific information discovered. Even in a single scientific field too many papers are to be preselected according to the individual interest and to be looked through in order to see what they are reporting on. [And of course they are too many in these preselected to be read and studied in detai I. At the present nobody wi I I help us with this last link of what is called the information chain. But let us not speak about this lamentable point now. l Some tools are already wei I known and have been used to master more easily the overwhelming flood of scientific production as far as the first selection of information is concerned. Bibl iographies covering specific fields are one of these tools. They extremely faci I itate the preselection and when carefully indexed they give the user much more than a heap of selected titles. Such a periodiC bibliography in the field of plant-water relations is sti I I lacking. 100 pp. Englisch.

Taschenbuch. Condition: Neu. This item is printed on demand - it takes 3-4 days longer - Neuware -337 F(e) = (z) where the angle between the directions III and 112 is equal to 8. r is the angular diameter effective distance of the epoch for recombination. F (8) ~ve have F(e) : f (e) ~ (S' ) e. . ~ is a Bessel function. It is assumed here that the spectrum of gravitational waves takes the form 1 hI'::: hoK for all relevant wavelengths, a is beam width of the radio antenna, d= d~, and ~ is the duration of the process of recombinations in -time. The results for different beam widths are shown in Fig. 1. 338 I. D. NOVIKOV 1-. . . -__ 0. 5 1 1. 5 2 e' 0. 5 o and for a l' (solid line) and Fig. 1. The function f(8) for n for a = 2' (dotted line). These formula should be used in analysing the implications of future observations. Comparison with the observational data now available enables us to establish an upper limit for the energy density of long gravitational waves. This method is most sensitive for gravitational waves with A ~ ct The fluctuations ~; due to these waves have scale ~ 0. 03 GW rec 4 radian. If, according to modern observations, we take ~; 10- , then 8 26 ~GW/Ey 10- for those gravitational waves which have A = 5. 10 cm GW today where Ey is the energy density of relict radiation. The fluctuations ~TT due to long gravitational waves with A = ct . 420 pp. Englisch.

Taschenbuch. Condition: Neu. This item is printed on demand - it takes 3-4 days longer - Neuware -It has become a tradition in the Union to publish the Invited Discourses and the Proceedings of the Joint Discussions held at a Gene ral Assembly in a separate volume entitled HIGHLIGHTS OF ASTRONOMY. This is the fourth volume of its kind and it contains some of the scientific highlights of the Grenoble General Assembly. In order to reduce its size it was decided to publish its content in two separate parts. The part (I) contains the full texts of the In vited Discourses given by Prof. J.-C. Pecker and by Dr. C. Sagan, and an abstract of Dr. P. Morrison's paper, thus complying with his wish to forego publication of the full text of his Discourse. Furthermore it collects the proceedings of three Joint Discussions and one Joint Meeting all of which are related essentially to observations from space, to external galaxies and to cosmology. Part (n) contains the proceedings of the four Joint Discussions and one Joint Meeting related essentially to stars and the structure of our Galaxy. Clearly Volume 4 (parts I and TI) of the Highlights reflects only a part of the scientific activities which took place at the Grenoble General Assembly. Many more important papers and discussions were held during Commission meetings and joint meetings. They may be found in the Commissions' reports published in the Transactions Vol. XVI B, 1977. 380 pp. Englisch.

Buch. Condition: Neu. This item is printed on demand - it takes 3-4 days longer - Neuware -The essays included in this volume are based on papers delivered at the International Symposium on Varieties of Marxism, held at the Van Leer Jerusalem Foundation on June 16-19,1974, and dedicated to the memory of George Lichtheim. When the idea of such a symposium was first raised, the organizers planned to have George Lichtheim as one of the main speakers at the event. In our last and brief meeting in London, I suggested this to him and Lichtheim gave his consent to attend the symposium, though at that time no date was yet fixed. His tragic death a few months later left a gap not only in the program of the symposium but in Marxist studies generally; it was felt that per haps one way of paying tribute to his contribution to the study of a subject so near to his mind would be to name the symposium in his memory and devote an introductory paper to an attempt at an intel lectual portrait of George Lichtheim as an historian of ideas. The volume as published includes all papers delivered at the sym posium, with the excep,tion of the papers of J. L. Talmon (Jerusalem) on 'Marxism and Nationalism' and Gajo Petrovic (Zagreb) on 'Yugo slav Marxism'. Appended is also a short obituary written by me on Lichtheim for the journal Political Science published by the American Political Science Association. 418 pp. Englisch.

Taschenbuch. Condition: Neu. This item is printed on demand - it takes 3-4 days longer - Neuware -Philosophers writing on the subject of human action have found it tempting to introduce their subject by raising Wittgenstein's question, 'What is left over if you subtract the fact that my arm goes up from the fact that I raise my arm ' The presumption is that something of particular interest is involved in an action of raising an arm that is not present in a mere bodily movement, and the philosopher's task is to specify just what this is. Unfortunately, such an approach does not take us very far, since a person could properly be said to raise his (or her) arm while asleep or hypnotized even though he (or she) would not be performing an action in the sense of 'action' with which philosophers are particularly concerned. To avoid this kind of difficulty I shall approach the subject of human action is a more academic way: I shall expound some important rival theories of human action, and introduce the relevant issues by commenting critically on those theories. One of the issues I eventually introduce is a metaphysical one. A theory of action makes sense, I contend, only on the assumption that there are such 'things' as actions (or events). After considering some key arguments bearing on the issue I conclude that, as matters currently stand in philosophy, a metaphysically noncommittal attitude toward actions and events seems justified. 224 pp. Englisch.

Taschenbuch. Condition: Neu. This item is printed on demand - it takes 3-4 days longer - Neuware -The cornerstone of the radical program of positivism was the separation of science from metaphysics. In the good old days, the solution to this demarca tion problem was seen as a way of separating sheep from goats - ~ynthetic or analytic propositions, which were candidates for truth or falsity, either on empirical or formal grounds, on the one hand; and, on the other hand, those deceptive propositions which appeared to be truth claims, but were instead either meaningless, or nonsensical, or poetical, or merely expressive - i.e. without proper cognitive content and hence not verifiable or falsifiable. In the last half century, analytic philosophy of science, linguistic analysis and logic have formulated and reformulated and reformulated again the distinction be tween science and metaphysics. The outcome was unexpected: metaphysics rather than retreating from the scene, shriveling up, dissolving, has instead re emerged as an acknowledged, even if problematic component of scientific theorizing. This has made some philosophers of science happy, others miserable. For Morris Lazerowitz, it should serve as evidence for his thesis that the sort of philosophical assertions which metaphysics makes about the nature of things are not simply radically undecidable, but persist because they express a deeper and unconscious function in the mental life of philosophers (and presumably, of those scientists who find it necessary to be philosophical in this way, whether self-consciously or tacitly). 240 pp. Englisch.

Taschenbuch. Condition: Neu. This item is printed on demand - it takes 3-4 days longer - Neuware -This present volume of the Boston College Studies in Philosophy presents thematically a commentary on the articles that appeared in the preceding issue of this series. In Volume IV, under the title Philoso phical Investigations in the USSR, there appeared six articles by contemporary Soviet philosophers on topics of concern for those in terested in philosophical dialogue. An interesting introduction was prepared by Professor L. Mitrokhin, head of the department of Con temporary Western Philosophy of the Institute of Philosophy of the Soviet Academy of Sciences. In his introduction, Professor Mitrokhin presented biographical data concerning the Soviet authors and listed their major research and publications in their respective fields. I would like to quote from Professor Mitrokhin's introduction to indicate to the reader something about the general themes and impor tance of that volume and to urge those who have not yet investigated its content to do so, not only because it is quite necessary as background for this volume, but also because of the light those articles shed on the developments that are occurring in Soviet philosophical thinking. Hence allow me to quote: ' . I regard this special edition represented by a number of articles written by Soviet philosophers as an extremely useful and symptomatic matter. Soviet philosophy has greatly changed during the past decade. New talented scholars have appeared introducing their individual style, problems and ways of thinking. 120 pp. Englisch.

Buch. Condition: Neu. This item is printed on demand - it takes 3-4 days longer - Neuware -The cornerstone of the radical program of positivism was the separation of science from metaphysics. In the good old days, the solution to this demarca tion problem was seen as a way of separating sheep from goats - ~ynthetic or analytic propositions, which were candidates for truth or falsity, either on empirical or formal grounds, on the one hand; and, on the other hand, those deceptive propositions which appeared to be truth claims, but were instead either meaningless, or nonsensical, or poetical, or merely expressive - i.e. without proper cognitive content and hence not verifiable or falsifiable. In the last half century, analytic philosophy of science, linguistic analysis and logic have formulated and reformulated and reformulated again the distinction be tween science and metaphysics. The outcome was unexpected: metaphysics rather than retreating from the scene, shriveling up, dissolving, has instead re emerged as an acknowledged, even if problematic component of scientific theorizing. This has made some philosophers of science happy, others miserable. For Morris Lazerowitz, it should serve as evidence for his thesis that the sort of philosophical assertions which metaphysics makes about the nature of things are not simply radically undecidable, but persist because they express a deeper and unconscious function in the mental life of philosophers (and presumably, of those scientists who find it necessary to be philosophical in this way, whether self-consciously or tacitly). 244 pp. Englisch.

Taschenbuch. Condition: Neu. This item is printed on demand - it takes 3-4 days longer - Neuware -It has become a tradition in the Union to publish the Invited Discourses and the Proceedings of the Joint Discussions held at a Gene ral Assembly in a separate volume entitled HIGHLIGHTS OF ASTRONOMY. This is the fourth volume of its kind and it contains some of the scientific highlights of the Grenoble General Assembly. In order to reduce its size it was decided to publish its content in two separate parts. The part (I) contains the full texts of the In vited Discourses given by Prof. J.-C. Pecker and by Dr. C. Sagan, and an abstract of Dr. P. Morrison's paper, thus complying with his wish to forego publication of the full text of his Discourse. Furthermore it collects the proceedings of three Joint Discussions and one Joint Meeting all of which are related essentially to observations from space, to external galaxies and to cosmology. Part (TI) contains the proceedings of the four Joint Discussions and one Joint Meeting related essentially to stars and the structure of our Galaxy. Clearly Volume 4 (parts I and TI) of the Highlights reflects only a part of the scientific activities which took place at the Grenoble General Assembly. Many more important papers and discussions were held during Commission meetings and joint meetings. They may be found in the Commissions' reports published in the Transactions Vol. XVI B, 1977. 416 pp. Englisch.

Taschenbuch. Condition: Neu. This item is printed on demand - it takes 3-4 days longer - Neuware -Su'ender and catch: give so you can receive, where the giving is your whole self, in a total experience. This is scarcely new on the American scene, and it is ancient knowledge, East and West. The fears of total surrender, the fears of self-revelation and of total abandon, although genuine, are likewise not new. Yet Kurt H. Wolff does attempt something new here, an epistemologi cal essay with the help of this old idea: his subtitle is 'experience and inquiry today'. He tries to formulate an integrated view which incorporates in the theory of total experience not only the accepted component- esthetics, religion, the recent American experience - but also a metaphysics, a phenomenology, a theory of perception, a social philosophy and a methodology of the social sciences, even a philosophy of history and psychopathology. Phenomenology (especially Alfred Schutz), the critical Frankfurt school (especially Adorno and Marcuse), sociology (especially Georg Simmel), and existentialism (especially Camus) are tied in together. It all looks topsy-turvy at first. We have here scraps of a diary, fragments of correspondence, a stray adolescent love letter, notes on notes on field work, and notes and comments on tutorial seminars plus long excerpts from students' essays, a stray paper in a learned journal summarizing the core of the book, comments piled on comments and a web of self-references, literary criticisms, and pieces of poetry, plus a rich scholarly apparatus. 424 pp. Englisch.

Buch. Condition: Neu. This item is printed on demand - it takes 3-4 days longer - Neuware -As long as algebra and geometry The unreasonable effectiveness of proceeded along separate paths, mathematics in science . . . Eugene Wigner their advance was slow and their applications limited. But when these sciences joined Weil, if you knows of a better 'oie, company, they drew from each go to it. Bruce Bairnsfather other fresh vitality and thence forward marched on at a rapid pace What is now proved was once only towards perfeetion. imagined. Wi1liam Blake J oseph Louis Lagrange Growing specialization and diversification have brought a host of monographs and textbooks on increasingly specialized topics. However, the 'tree' of knowledge of mathematics and related fields does not grow only by putting forth new branches. It also happens, quite often in fact, that branches which were thought to be completely disparate are suddenly seen to be related. This series of books, Mathematics and Its Applications, is devoted to such (new) interrelations as exempla gratia: - a central concept which plays an important role in several different mathematical and/or scientific specialized areas; Editor's Preface 8 - new applications of the results and ideas from one area of scientific endeavor into another; - influences which the results, problems and concepts of one field of inquiry have and have had on the development of another. With books on topics such as these, of moderate length and price, which are stimulating rather than definitive, intriguing rather than encyclopaedic, we hope to contribute something towards better communication among the practitioners in diversified fields. 190 pp. Englisch.

Buch. Condition: Neu. This item is printed on demand - it takes 3-4 days longer - Neuware -With this third edition of Nelson Goodman's The Structure of Appear ance, we are pleased to make available once more one of the most in fluential and important works in the philosophy of our times. Professor Geoffrey Hellman's introduction gives a sustained analysis and appreciation of the major themes and the thrust of the book, as well as an account of the ways in which many of Goodman's problems and projects have been picked up and developed by others. Hellman also suggests how The Structure of Appearance introduces issues which Goodman later continues in his essays and in the Languages of Art. There remains the task of understanding Good man's project as a whole; to see the deep continuities of his thought, as it ranges from logic to epistemology, to science and art; to see it therefore as a complex yet coherent theory of human cognition and practice. What we can only hope to suggest, in this note, is the b. road Significance of Goodman's apparently technical work for philosophers, scientists and humanists. One may say of Nelson Goodman that his bite is worse than his bark. Behind what appears as a cool and methodical analysis of the conditions of the construction of systems, there lurks a radical and disturbing thesis: that the world is, in itself, no more one way than another, nor are we. It depends on the ways in which we take it, and on what we do. 348 pp. Englisch.

Taschenbuch. Condition: Neu. This item is printed on demand - it takes 3-4 days longer - Neuware -With this third edition of Nelson Goodman's The Structure of Appear ance, we are pleased to make available once more one of the most in fluential and important works in the philosophy of our times. Professor Geoffrey Hellman's introduction gives a sustained analysis and appreciation of the major themes and the thrust of the book, as well as an account of the ways in which many of Goodman's problems and projects have been picked up and developed by others. Hellman also suggests how The Structure of Appearance introduces issues which Goodman later continues in his essays and in the Languages of Art. There remains the task of understanding Good man's project as a whole; to see the deep continuities of his thought, as it ranges from logic to epistemology, to science and art; to see it therefore as a complex yet coherent theory of human cognition and practice. What we can only hope to suggest, in this note, is the b. road Significance of Goodman's apparently technical work for philosophers, scientists and humanists. One may say of Nelson Goodman that his bite is worse than his bark. Behind what appears as a cool and methodical analysis of the conditions of the construction of systems, there lurks a radical and disturbing thesis: that the world is, in itself, no more one way than another, nor are we. It depends on the ways in which we take it, and on what we do. 348 pp. Englisch.