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43Talk about ethics involves a great number of different sorts of concepts – rules, virtues, values, outcomes, rights, etc … Ethics is about all those things, but it is not fundamentally about them. Let’s review them with a view to seeing why they are not basic.
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42Homomorphisms between Verma modules in characteristic PJournal of Algebra 112 58-85. 1988.The composition series of Verma modules and homomorphisms between Verma modules in the case of a complex semisimple Lie algebra were studied by Verma and by Bernstein, Gelfand and Gelfand. The author studies homomorphisms between the Verma modules in characteristic p.
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41Accountancy and the quantification of rights: Giving moral values legal teethCentre for an Ethical Society Papers. 2007.If a company’s share price rises when it sacks workers, or when it makes money from polluting the environment, it would seem that the accounting is not being done correctly. Real costs are not being paid. People’s ethical claims, which in a smaller-scale case would be legally enforceable, are not being measured in such circumstances. This results from a mismatch between the applied ethics tradition and the practice of the accounting profession. Applied ethics has mostly avoided quantification of…Read more
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38Review of Jacob Bernoulli, The Art of Conjecturing, together with Letter to a Friend on Sets in Court Tennis,Translated by Edith Dudley Sylla (review)Isis 101 (1): 213-214. 2010.Review of Sylla's translation of Jacob Bernoulli's Art of Conjecturing, emphasising Bernoulli's success in understanding multiple quantifiers to formulate and prove a law of large numbers
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35Scepticism′s Health BuoyantPhilosophy 69 (270). 1994.Replies to O. Hanfling, ‘Healthy scepticism?’, Philosophy 68 (1993), 91-3, which criticized J. Franklin, ‘Healthy scepticism’, Philosophy 66 (1991), 305-324. The symmetry argument for scepticism is defended (that there is no reason to prefer the realist alternative to sceptical ones).
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35Elliptical Orbits and the Aristotelian Scientific Revolution Comment on GroarkeStudia Neoaristotelica 13 (2): 169-179. 2016.The Scientific Revolution was far from the anti-Aristotelian movement traditionally pictured. Its applied mathematics pursued by new means the Aristotelian ideal of science as knowledge by insight into necessary causes. Newton’s derivation of Kepler’s elliptical planetary orbits from the inverse square law of gravity is a central example.
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29Review of Metaphysics and Scientific Realism: Essays in Honour of David Malet Armstrong, edited by Francesco F. Calemi (review)Australasian Journal of Philosophy 96 (1): 183-186. 2018.
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29Regulated capitalism, market socialismDissent 5 11-13. 2001.In response to Eric Aarons' `Why Communism failed' (Dissent no. 4, 2001) it is argued that the present "capitalist" system is in fact so regulated as to be a hybrid of capitalist and socialist principles. It has some success in putting economic power into the hands of most people, though it needs restraint to cope with market failures.
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27Review of Woosuk Park, Philosophy’s Loss of Logic to Mathematics: An Inadequately Understood Take-Over (review)Philosophia Mathematica 27 (3): 440-443. 2019.ParkWoosuk. _Philosophy’s Loss of Logic to Mathematics: An Inadequately Understood Take-Over _. Studies in Applied Philosophy, Epistemology, and Rational Ethics; 43. Springer, 2018. ISBN: 978-3-319-95146-1 ; 978-3-030-06984-1 978-3-319-95147-8. Pp. xii + 230. doi: 10.1007/978-3-319-95147-8
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27Review of Keith Hossack, Knowledge and the Philosophy of Number: What Numbers Are and How They Are Known (review)Philosophia Mathematica 30 (1): 127-129. 2022.Hossack presents a clearly argued case that numbers (cardinals, ordinals, and ratios) are not objects (as Platonists think), nor properties of objects, but properties of quantities.
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27Dynamic context generation for natural language understanding: A multifaceted knowledge approachIEEE Transactions on Systems, Man and Cybernetics Part A 33 23-41. 2003.We describe a comprehensive framework for text un- derstanding, based on the representation of context. It is designed..
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26Is philosophy irrelevant to science?Philosopher's Zone (ABC Radio National) 0-0. 2009.Scientists get on with the job – they do stuff with test tubes or with computers – but can philosophers help them? Do they need help and, if so, do they think they need help? This week, we examine what philosophers of science talk about and what effect it might have on what scientists actually do.
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26Review of The empire of chance: How probability changed science and everyday life, by Gerd Gigerenzer, Zeno Swijtink, Theodore Porter, Lorraine Daston, John Beatty and Lorenz Krüger (review)History of European Ideas 12 (4): 572-573. 1990.
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23Elliptical orbits and the Aristotelian Scientific RevolutionStudia Neoaristotelica 13 (2): 69-79. 2016.The Scientific Revolution was far from the anti-Aristotelian movement traditionally pictured. Its applied mathematics pursued by new means the Aristotelian ideal of science as knowledge by insight into necessary causes. Newton’s derivation of Kepler’s elliptical planetary orbits from the inverse square law of gravity is a central example.
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22David Stove's Darwinian Fairytales (review)MercatorNet 0-0. 2006.Favourably reviews David Stove's Darwinian Fairytales, which argued that Darwinism is a complex theory with a distant relation to empirical evidence.
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22Seized by the spirit of modern science (review)Metascience 6 (1): 1-28. 1997.Reviews of Peter Dear's Discipline and Experience: The Mathematical Way in the Scientific Revolution.
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21Reflections on Kurt Gödel (review)History of European Ideas 13 (5): 637-638. 1991.A review of Hao Wang's Reflections on Kurt Goedel, emphasising Goedel's reaction against his Vienna Circle background.
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20Is jensenism compatible with christianity?Quadrant 48 (12): 30-31. 2004.A RECENT BIOGRAPHY of Marcus Loane, evangelical Anglican Archbishop of Sydney in the 1960s, records that as a student at Moore Theological College he would read during lectures to avoid having to listen to the liberal Principal. When you are committed to a closed system of thought, you can't be too careful when it comes to letting ideas in from the outside. But what about the ideas already inside? How does the Sydney Anglican interpretation of Christianity compare to what Jesus said?
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19'Social justice': Utopian fantasy or foundation of prosperity?Online Opinion. 2008.publication and Now, it may well be that some wet-behind-the-ears bishops with little understanding of economics do use the term Governments relies on the “social justice” to give a colour of moral dignity to views that are a touch socialist. But what was missing in Abbott’s cannot pick winners generosity of its..
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19The empire of chance: How probability changed science and everyday life (review)History of European Ideas 12 (4): 572-573. 1990.
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16Australian PhilosophySydney Philosophy Forum. 2010.Greek, Latin and Ancient History. Instead, after a good result in mathematics, I decided to pursue that instead. That left me with an extra subject to choose to fill up first year. What was this "Philosophy" on offer? I couldn't understand where there was something in the spectrum of knowledge for philosophy to be about. Biology was about cats, English was about language and literature, mathematics was about numbers (I was not yet philosophically smart enough to realise there was a problem as to…Read more
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13Elected Ignorance (review)Quadrant 27 (12): 91-92. 1983.Reviews Lewis's account of the low interest Islamic culture has generally shown about other cultures, and suggests that Islamic openness caused by military weakness may be imitated by the Soviet Union.
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10UncertaintyEncounter (ABC Radio National) 0-0. 2006.Postmodernism is an attitude of suspicion, indeed of unteachable suspicion, in the face of evidence.
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8Reasonable science (review)New Criterion 22 (3): 70-73. 2003.Review of Susan Haack, Defending Science - Within Reason. The review suggests that Haack's defense of scientific rationality is correct as far as it goes but could be more enthusiastic.
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7Philosophy, mathematics and structurePhilosopher: revue pour tous 1 (2): 31-38. 1995.An early version of the work on mathematics as the science of structure that appeared later as An Aristotelian Realist Philosophy of Mathematics (2014)
Sydney, New South Wales, Australia
Areas of Specialization
Applied Ethics |
Science, Logic, and Mathematics |
Philosophy of Mathematics |
Interpretation of Probability |
Areas of Interest
Philosophy of Mathematics |
General Philosophy of Science |
PhilPapers Editorships
Mathematical Aristotelianism |