L. Anthony

Recent scholarship argues that William of Ockham was not the radical voluntarist that historians of philosophy sometimes claimed. This “revisionist” account depends upon a reading of “_recta ratio_”. Brian Tierney posits Ockham as a “rationalist” while Janet Coleman suggests that Ockham's right action is “objectively rational”. This chapter articulates Aquinas's use of _recta ratio_, indicates differences with Ockham, and suggests that Ockham is at most a “good reasons philosopher.” Aquinas defines human nature as a natural kind determined by dispositional properties with the final cause rooted in the formal cause. Ockham rejects a cluster of concepts Aquinas uses in spelling out his theory of natural law—natural kind, substantial form, intellect superior to will, final cause—all of which are necessary conditions for Aquinas's Aristotelian-based meta-ethics, which is a form of ethical naturalism. Ockham's use of _recta ratio_ is less robust; if Ockham is a rationalist, it is at best a quite limited version of medieval rationalism.

Responding to recent concerns about the reliability of the published literature in psychology and other disciplines, we formed the X-Phi Replicability Project to estimate the reproducibility of experimental philosophy. Drawing on a representative sample of 40 x-phi studies published between 2003 and 2015, we enlisted 20 research teams across 8 countries to conduct a high-quality replication of each study in order to compare the results to the original published findings. We found that x-phi studies – as represented in our sample – successfully replicated about 70% of the time. We discuss possible reasons for this relatively high replication rate in the field of experimental philosophy and offer suggestions for best research practices going forward.

While historians of psychology have generally traced the articulation of causal models of mind to the mid-seventeenth-century mechanistic turn associated with René Descartes and Thomas Hobbes, the devotional treatise The Psalme of Mercy or, A Meditation vpon the 51. Psalme, by a true Penitent by Sir John Bennett (one of Oxford University’s ‘Three Worthies’ and a figure of notable scholarly repute), indicates that such sequential conceptions of cognition and action were already being articulated within the introspective theological literature of early-Stuart England. In this short paper, I examine Bennet’s formulation of the inward progression: “to engender and produce from imagination, to assent; from assent, to delectation; from delectation, to resolution; from resolution, to execution,”arguing that this appears to constitute the earliest currently identified English expression of a causal-psychological model linking thought to behaviour, thereby reframing the origins of modern cognitive theory in a devotional, rather than philosophical, context.

This extraordinary book had an extraordinary genesis. In July 1973, for the first time in its history, _The New York Times Magazine_ devoted a full issue to a single article: Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Anthony Lukas's account of the Watergate story to date. Six months later, a second installment ran in another full issue. Later the Times asked him to write still a third issue on the impeachment. This piece never appeared because it was overtaken by Nixon's resignation. But Lukas's painstaking reporting on Nixon's last months in office appears here, twenty-five years after his resignation, for the first time in paperback, along with added information on every aspect of Watergate. Widely acclaimed as a major text of the Watergate saga, J. Anthony Lukas's _Nightmare_, with a new foreword from presidential historian Joan Hoff, is an investigative masterwork highlighted by in-depth character sketches of the key players. As described by _Publishers Weekly_, “The result is a model of measured judgment and of careful selection and synthesis, and it is presented with such masterly narrative skill that one reads the old familiar story as if it were all new and fresh.” For students of history coming to these events for the first time, _Nightmare_ reveals in depth the particular trauma of a nation in turmoil; for those who remember, it is once more brought to life.

This study took place in an introductory science inquiry course for preservice elementary school teachers as a supplement to lessons on critical thinking. The correspondence of Charles Darwin was used to provide historical context to nature of science concepts of the sociocultural embeddedness of science, the subjective and reflective nature of the knowledge and experiences of scientists, and science is composed of different types of empirically based knowledge. Darwin’s own words, reactions to other’s words and ideas, and personal correspondences illustrate the undercurrent of social interactions and private thought processes that furthered the development of scientific understanding. Qualitative analysis of student data indicates that these historical letters provided a medium through which students were able to recognize ideas commonly identified as NOS. With the appropriate instructional and pedagogical supports described, students demonstrated knowledge of the historical context of Darwin’s work and the social enterprise of science illustrated through that work, leading to their developing understanding of the nature of science.

Over the last three decades Anthony La Vopa has extended his reach as an Enlightenment historian from Germany to England, Scotland, and France. Enlightenment Past and Present: Essays in a Social History of Ideas provides insights into all four contexts, with a view to understanding the Enlightenment's contours in spaces that were distinct but nonetheless shared in a European-wide engagement with a cluster of political, social, and cultural issues. The volume explores a wide variety of themes in the formation of modernity, including the construction of a public, the emergence of modern feminism, the problematic legitimacy of marriage, the ideal and practice of friendship, patron-client relations, the conversational sociability of politeness, and the evolution of the essay as a genre. La Vopa aims to demonstrate in practice the new interest in restoring the social to intellectual history without falling back into reductionism. He throws a spotlight on a number of key texts in eighteenth-century philosophy. In several essays, La Vopa employs the resources of meaning in rhetorical cultures with thick social contexts to present Enlightenment texts not simply as print records, but as rhetorical performances with specific audiences. He also often intertwines contexts by focusing on biographical experience, using 'private' life traces such as diaries and other forms of correspondence, to enhance our understanding of published discourse. While drawing on the history of philosophy, the volume takes a decidedly more historical path through the canon, and includes essay reviews which take stock of developments in Enlightenment studies via critical appraisals of major recent contributions to the field.

This paper builds upon the original framework The Bubble Allegory, which employs simple physical elements—bubbles, a well, air, and light—to explore the relationship between consciousness, perception, and reality. These symbols, along with their metaphysical counterparts, emerged in the form of a spontaneous vision at the age of eighteen whilst concluding a 30 page novella, initiating a process of reverse engineering. The use of these symbols, the foundational structure of the entireity of both the original and this expansion, that came with their specific metaphysical counterparts (even the bubble’s surface as perception, enveloping air which is consciousness within) are not found in existing literature accessible in any existing online repository. Any doubt about this would be resolved by your own deep search. Following the structure established by this vision, the paper ventures into speculative territory, linking contemporary scientific concepts such as quantum fields, vacuums, and optics with ancient metaphysical ideas such as the Platonic realm of mathematical truths. The objective is not to draw definitive conclusions, but to encourage further exploration of potential connections across diverse fields of thought, utilising a symbolic framework and approach not previously explored in existing literature. We can see the allegory as scale-invariant ontology, primarily due to the inclusion of these aforementioned realms. It should also be clarified that the allegory effectively blurs the line between metaphor and metonym.

This paper builds upon the original framework The Bubble Allegory, which employs simple physical elements—bubbles, a well, air, and light—to explore the relationship between consciousness, perception, and reality. These symbols, along with their metaphysical counterparts, emerged in the form of a spontaneous vision at the age of eighteen whilst concluding a 30 page novella, initiating a process of reverse engineering. The use of these symbols, the foundational structure of the entireity of both the original and this expansion, that came with their specific metaphysical counterparts (even the bubble’s surface as perception, enveloping air which is consciousness within) are not found in existing literature accessible in any existing online repository. Any doubt about this would be resolved by your own deep search. Following the structure established by this vision, the paper ventures into speculative territory, linking contemporary scientific concepts such as quantum fields, vacuums, and optics with ancient metaphysical ideas such as the Platonic realm of mathematical truths. The objective is not to draw definitive conclusions, but to encourage further exploration of potential connections across diverse fields of thought, utilising a symbolic framework and approach not previously explored in existing literature. We can see the allegory as scale-invariant ontology, primarily due to the inclusion of these aforementioned realms. It should also be clarified that the allegory effectively blurs the line between metaphor and metonym.

This paper employs the ideas of geometric algebra to investigate the physical content of Dirac's electron theory. The basis is Hestenes' discovery of the geometric significance of the Dirac spinor, which now represents a Lorentz transformation in spacetime. This transformation specifies a definite velocity, which might be interpreted as that of a real electron. Taken literally, this velocity yields predictions of tunnelling times through potential barriers, and defines streamlines in spacetime that would correspond to electron paths. We also present a general, first-order diffraction theory for electromagnetic and Dirac waves. We conclude with a critical appraisal of the Dirac theory

A new calculus, based upon the multivector derivative, is developed for Lagrangian mechanics and field theory, providing streamlined and rigorous derivations of the Euler-Lagrange equations. A more general form of Noether's theorem is found which is appropriate to both discrete and continuous symmetries. This is used to find the conjugate currents of the Dirac theory, where it improves on techniques previously used for analyses of local observables. General formulas for the canonical stress-energy and angular-momentum tensors are derived, with spinors and vectors treated in a unified way. It is demonstrated that the antisymmetric terms in the stress-energy tensor are crucial to the correct treatment of angular momentum. The multivector derivative is extended to provide a functional calculus for linear functions which is more compact and more powerful than previous formalisms. This is demonstrated in a reformulation of the functional derivative with respect to the metric, which is then used to recover the full canonical stress-energy tensor. Unlike conventional formalisms, which result in a symmetric stress-energy tensor, our reformulation retains the potentially important antisymmetric contribution

This paper contains a tutorial introduction to the ideas of geometric algebra, concentrating on its physical applications. We show how the definition of a “geometric product” of vectors in 2-and 3-dimensional space provides precise geometrical interpretations of the imaginary numbers often used in conventional methods. Reflections and rotations are analyzed in terms of bilinear spinor transformations, and are then related to the theory of analytic functions and their natural extension in more than two dimensions (monogenics), Physics is greatly facilitated by the use of Hestenes' spacetime algebra, which automatically incorporates the geometric structure of spacetime. This is demonstrated by examples from electromagnetism. In the course of this purely classical exposition many surprising results are obtained—results which are usually thought to belong to the preserve of quantum theory. We conclude that geometric algebra is the most powerful and general language available for the development of mathematical physics

The spacetime algebra (STA) is the natural, representation-free language for Dirac's theory of the electron. Conventional Pauli, Dirac, Weyl, and Majorana spinors are replaced by spacetime multivectors, and the quantum σ- and γ-matrices are replaced by two-sided multivector operations. The STA is defined over the reals, and the role of the scalar unit imaginary of quantum mechanics is played by a fixed spacetime bivector. The extension to multiparticle systems involves a separate copy of the STA for each particle, and it is shown that the standard unit imaginary induces correlations between these particle spaces. In the STA, spinors and operators can be manipulated without introducing any matrix representation or coordinate system. Furthermore, the formalism provides simple expressions for the spinor bilinear covariants which dispense with the need for the Fierz identities. A reduction to2+1 dimensions is given, and applications beyond the Dirac theory are discussed.