Intuitionism vs. Classicism

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nick Haverkamp

In the early twentieth century, the Dutch mathematician L.E.J. Brouwer launched a powerful attack on the prevailing mathematical methods and theories. He developed a new kind of constructive mathematics, called intuitionism, which seems to allow for a rigorous refutation of widely accepted mathematical assumptions including fundamental principles of classical logic. Following an intense mathematical debate esp. in the 1920s, Brouwer's revolutionary criticism became a central philosophical concern in the 1970s, when Michael Dummett tried to substantiate it with meaning-theoretic considerations. Since that time, the debate between intuitionists and classicists has remained a central philosophical dispute with far-reaching implications for mathematics, logic, epistemology, and semantics. In this book, Nick Haverkamp presents a detailed analysis of the intuitionistic criticism of classical logic and mathematics. The common assumption that intuitionism and classicism are equally legitimate enterprises corresponding to different understandings of logical or mathematical expressions is investigated and rejected, and the major intuitionistic arguments against classical logic are scrutinised and repudiated. Haverkamp argues that the disagreement between intuitionism and classicism is a fundamental logical and mathematical dispute which cannot be resolved by means of meta-mathematical, epistemological, or semantic considerations.

2010 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 437-457 ◽  
Author(s):  
SHRUTI KAPILA

This essay revises the common assumption that non-violence has been central to political modernity in India. The “extremist” nationalist B. G. Tilak, through a foundational philosophical reinterpretation of the Bhagavad Gita, created a modern theology of the Indian “political”. Tilak did so by directly confronting the question of the possibility of the “event” of war and the ethics of the conversion of kinsmen into enemies. Writing in the aftermath of the Swadeshi movement and from a prison cell in Rangoon, Tilak interpreted action as sacrificial duty that created a vocabulary of violence in which killing was naturalized. Violence, whether conceptual or otherwise, was not directed towards the “outsider” but was of meaning only when directed against the intimate. Unlike the distinction between friend and foe that has been taken as central to the understanding of the political in the twentieth century, it was instead the fraternal–enmity issue that framed the modern political in India. Tilak foregrounded the idea of a de-historicized political subject, whose existence was entirely dependent upon the event of violence itself. This helps to explain both the unprecedented violence that accompanied freedom and partition in 1947 and also the fact that it has remained unmemorialized to the present day.


Author(s):  
Alexander Kaye

This chapter examines the place of the idea of the halakhic state in Israel today, and how the legacy of its early years has contributed to ongoing tensions in Israeli society. Decades after it was crafted by religious Zionist leaders in the early years of the state, the ideology of the halakhic state emerged even more strongly at the end of the twentieth century and the goal of halakhic supremacy became an ever more salient point of contention between religious and secular Israelis. The chapter challenges the common assumption that there was an abrupt change in religious Zionist attitudes, from accommodation to confrontation, after 1967, arguing instead that the more assertive stance of religious Zionists after 1967 would not have been possible without the earlier ideological groundwork laid by Isaac Herzog and his supporters. The chapter also puts the history of religious Zionism into conversation with recent scholarship on religion and state more globally and tentatively suggests how a fuller understanding of the history of the halakhic state might help alleviate social conflict in Israel today.


2019 ◽  
pp. 13-26
Author(s):  
William J. Bond

Climate has long been considered the prime factor determining the distribution of major vegetation based on climate–vegetation correlations. These correlations underlie the common assumption that there is a single stable vegetation state for a given climate. Thus tropical forests are characteristic of climates that are warm and wet, deserts where climates are dry. But the assumption of ‘one climate = one vegetation’ is not true for large parts of the world. These have strikingly different vegetation states, such as forests and grasslands, occurring in the same landscapes and sharing the same climate. Correlative approaches are being challenged by process-based biogeographic models which reveal the extent of the vegetation–climate mismatch. For most of the twentieth century the non-forested ecosystems were thought to be secondary vegetation produced by deforestation and anthropogenic burning. While deforestation has occurred and is increasing at an alarming rate, there is also growing evidence for ancient origins of many naturally non-forested ecosystems.


Author(s):  
Oren Izenberg

This book offers a new way to understand the divisions that organize twentieth-century poetry. It argues that the most important conflict is not between styles or aesthetic politics, but between poets who seek to preserve or produce the incommensurable particularity of experience by making powerful objects, and poets whose radical commitment to abstract personhood seems altogether incompatible with experience—and with poems. Reading across the apparent gulf that separates traditional and avant-garde poets, the book reveals the common philosophical urgency that lies behind diverse forms of poetic difficulty—from William Butler Yeats's esoteric symbolism and George Oppen's minimalism and silence to Frank O'Hara's joyful slightness and the Language poets' rejection of traditional aesthetic satisfactions. For these poets, what begins as a practical question about the conduct of literary life—what distinguishes a poet or group of poets?—ends up as an ontological inquiry about social life: What is a person and how is a community possible? In the face of the violence and dislocation of the twentieth century, these poets resist their will to mastery, shy away from the sensual richness of their strongest work, and undermine the particularity of their imaginative and moral visions—all in an effort to allow personhood itself to emerge as an undeniable fact making an unrefusable claim.


NASPA Journal ◽  
1998 ◽  
Vol 35 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jackie Clark ◽  
Joan Hirt

The creation of small communities has been proposed as a way of enhancing the educational experience of students at large institutions. Using data from a survey of students living in large and small residences at a public research university, this study does not support the common assumption that small-scale social environments are more conducive to positive community life than large-scale social environments.


Author(s):  
Philippe Lorino

The pragmatist intellectual trend started as an anti-Cartesian revolt by amateur philosophers and became a major inspiration for anti-Taylorian managerial thought. In the early days of the pragmatist movement, a small group of friends fought idealist and Cartesian ideas. The influence of classical pragmatists Peirce, James, Dewey, and Mead, and some of their closest fellow travellers (Royce, Addams, Follett, and Lewis), grew in the first decades of the twentieth century. Some misunderstandings of the central tenets of pragmatism later led to its distortion into the common language acceptance of the word “pragmatism” and contributed to a relative decline in the 1930s, precisely when pragmatism began to inspire an anti-Taylorian managerial movement. Finally the chapter narrates how “the pragmatist turn,” a revival of pragmatist ideas, took place in the last quarter of the twentieth century.


Religions ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (3) ◽  
pp. 222
Author(s):  
Elaine M. Fisher

This article makes the case that Vīraśaivism emerged in direct textual continuity with the tantric traditions of the Śaiva Age. In academic practice up through the present day, the study of Śaivism, through Sanskrit sources, and bhakti Hinduism, through the vernacular, are generally treated as distinct disciplines and objects of study. As a result, Vīraśaivism has yet to be systematically approached through a philological analysis of its precursors from earlier Śaiva traditions. With this aim in mind, I begin by documenting for the first time that a thirteenth-century Sanskrit work of what I have called the Vīramāheśvara textual corpus, the Somanāthabhāṣya or Vīramāheśvarācārasāroddhārabhāṣya, was most likely authored by Pālkurikĕ Somanātha, best known for his vernacular Telugu Vīraśaiva literature. Second, I outline the indebtedness of the early Sanskrit and Telugu Vīramāheśvara corpus to a popular work of early lay Śaivism, the Śivadharmaśāstra, with particular attention to the concepts of the jaṅgama and the iṣṭaliṅga. That the Vīramāheśvaras borrowed many of their formative concepts and practices directly from the Śivadharmaśāstra and other works of the Śaiva Age, I argue, belies the common assumption that Vīraśaivism originated as a social and religious revolution.


Author(s):  
Clemens Buchen ◽  
Alberto Palermo

AbstractWe relax the common assumption of homogeneous beliefs in principal-agent relationships with adverse selection. Principals are competitors in the product market and write contracts also on the base of an expected aggregate. The model is a version of a cobweb model. In an evolutionary learning set-up, which is imitative, principals can have different beliefs about the distribution of agents’ types in the population. The resulting nonlinear dynamic system is studied. Convergence to a uniform belief depends on the relative size of the bias in beliefs.


2006 ◽  
Vol 39 (2) ◽  
pp. 265-281 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tomas Larsson

This article explains why massive political corruption appears to be incompatible with economic growth in Russia but compatible with very rapid economic growth in China. The common assumption is that corruption is bad for economic performance. So how can we explain the puzzling contrast between Russia and China? Is Russia being more severely “punished” for its corruption than China? If so, why? This article demonstrates that three intervening factors—comparative advantage, the organization of corruption, and the nature of rents—determines the impact of corruption on economic performance, and that these factors can explain the divergent outcomes. The article thereby offers an alternative to statist explanations of the Russia-China paradox.


1995 ◽  
Vol 41 (2) ◽  
pp. 126-135 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jos M. Raaijmakers ◽  
Lentse van der Sluis ◽  
Peter A. H. M. Bakker ◽  
Bob Schippers ◽  
Margot Koster ◽  
...  

In this study, the potential of different Pseudomonas strains to utilize heterologous siderophores was compared with their competitiveness in the rhizosphere of radish. This issue was investigated in interactions between Pseudomonas putida WCS358 and Pseudomonas fluoresceins WCS374 and in interactions between strain WCS358 and eight indigenous Pseudomonas strains capable of utilizing pseudobactin 358. During four successive plant growth cycles of radish, strain WCS358 significantly reduced rhizosphere population densities of the wild-type strain WCS374 by up to 30 times, whereas derivative strain WCS374(pMR), harboring the siderophore receptor PupA for ferric pseudobactin 358, maintained its population density. Studies involving interactions between strain WCS358 and eight different indigenous Pseudomonas strains demonstrated that despite the ability of these indigenous isolates to utilize pseudobactin 358, their rhizosphere population densities were significantly reduced by strain WCS358 by up to 20 times. Moreover, rhizosphere colonization by WCS358 was not affected by any of these indigenous strains, even though siderophore-mediated growth inhibition of WCS358 by a majority of these strains was demonstrated in a plate bioassay. In conclusion, it can be stated that siderophore-mediated competition for iron is a major determinant in interactions between WCS358 and WCS374 in the rhizosphere. Moreover, our findings support the common assumption that cloning of siderophore receptor genes from one Pseudomonas strain into another can confer a competitive advantage in interactions in the rhizosphere. Interactions between WCS358 and the selected indigenous rhizosphere isolates, however, indicate that other traits also contribute to the rhizosphere competence of fluorescent Pseudomonas spp.Key words: siderophore, siderophore receptors, root colonization, fluorescent Pseudomonas.


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