Steve Gimbel

At first glance, it is surprising that contemporary racist organizations like the Ku Klux Klan advertise a pro‐environmental stance. This fact, however, might be expected by Luc Ferry, who argues for a connection between the racism and nature protection laws of the Third Reich. Ferry argues that a non‐anthropocentric approach to nature makes it easier to dehumanize humans so that a non‐anthropocentric environmental ethic can transform into racist environmentalism. Does this contemporary case vindicate Ferry? We argue that it does not. When the underlying theoretical foundations and historical conditions that gave rise to the racist environmentalist movements and the contemporary non‐anthropocentric environmental left are analyzed, quite different pictures emerge: one type of non‐anthropocentric environmentalism is racist, one type of anthropocentric environmentalism is racist, and one type of non‐anthropocentric environmentalism is not racist, meaning that any relation between a non‐anthropocentric approach to nature and dehumanizing the Other is more complex and historically contextual than Ferry allows.

The standard understanding of tautologies is that they are semantically vacuous. Yet tautological utterances occur frequently in conversational discourse. One approach contends that apparent tautological statements are either genuinely tautologous and thereby semantically vacuous or are what we term ¿pseudo-tautologies¿, i.e., sentences that only bear a formal syntactic resemblance to tautologies but are not in fact tautologous. Another approach follows Grice and asserts that the meaning of a tautological utterance derives from an inference made by the listener from the utterance via universal rules of conversation to a non-tautological proposition. We deny both accounts for a subset of tautological utterances that are both content-bearing and truly tautological. Such ¿deep tautologies¿ acquire meaning not by shedding their tautological status, but by drawing attention to it. Since only non-vague noun phrases will support tautological statements of the form N is N, the use of a tautology of this form in conversational context will, by its use as a tautology, indicate the speaker¿s intention that the noun phrase be considered non-vague

The running debate between Peter Achinstein and his critics concerning the nature of scientific evidence is misguided as each side attempts to explicate a distinct notion of evidence. Achinstein's approach, however, is valuable in helping to point out a problem with Carnap's statistical relevance model. By claiming an increase in probability to be necessary for evidence, the received view is incapable of accounting for evidence which is statistically irrelevant but explanatorily relevant. A broader view of evidence which can account for pragmatic concerns such as explanation is thereby required.

Hans Reichenbach, a philosopher of science who was one of five students in Einstein's first seminar on the general theory of relativity, became Einstein's bulldog, defending the theory against criticism from philosophers, physicists, and popular commentators. This book chronicles the development of Reichenbach's reconstruction of Einstein's theory in a way that clearly sets out all of its philosophical commitments and its physical predictions as well as the battles that Reichenbach fought on its behalf, in both the academic and popular press. The essays include reviews and responses to philosophical colleagues; polemical discussions with physicists Max Born and D. C. Miller; as well as popular articles meant for the layperson. At a time when physics and philosophy were both undergoing revolutionary changes in content and method, this book is a window into the development of scientific philosophy and the role of the philosopher.

Garry Kasparov made two allegations of unfairness in his recent chess match with the computer ‘Deep Blue’. The purpose of this inquiry is to determine whether the ethos of the contest would be violated if the purported activities had occurred and on what grounds. Kasparov’s first allegation, that the program was tampered with during play, would if true, violate fair play as it would encroach on Deep Blue’s autonomy, a necessary condition for fair play in individual strategic endeavours. The most charitable interpretation of Kasparov’s second allegation, that scouting information was used in an unfair manner, concerns questions of the nature of the identity of artificial individuals. Consideration of this issue finds Kasparov’s claim groundless

The standard understanding of tautologies is that they are semantically vacuous. Yet tautological utterances occur frequently in conversational discourse. One approach contends that apparent tautological statements are either genuinely tautologous and thereby semantically vacuous or are what we term “pseudo-tautologies”, i.e., sentences that only bear a formal syntactic resemblance to tautologies but are not in fact tautologous. Another approach follows Grice and asserts that the meaning of a tautological utterance derives from an inference made by the listener from the utterance via universal rules of conversation to a non-tautological proposition. We deny both accounts for a subset of tautological utterances that are both content-bearing and truly tautological. Such “deep tautologies” acquire meaning not by shedding their tautological status, but by drawing attention to it. Since only non-vague noun phrases will support tautological statements of the form N is N, the use of a tautology of this form in conversational context will, by its use as a tautology, indicate the speaker’s intention that the noun phrase be considered non-vague.