henry laycock
Come away o human child
To the waters and the wild
With a fairy hand-in-hand
For the world's more full of weeping
Than you can understand
W. B. YEATS
Alumnus, King James Grammar School
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_James%27s_Grammar_School,_Almondbury
'Our life on earth is, and ought to be, material and carnal. But we have not yet learned to manage our materialism and carnality properly; they are still entangled with the desire for ownership'. E. M. Forster
CATEGORIES. My interests are heavily focused on categories, in a traditional logico-metaphysical sense - and especially on categories (and the corresponding concepts) which seem to lie beyond the scope of the dominant 'substance' oriented categories. Among these, the semantical and metaphysical categories associated with so-called mass nouns are of particular interest. I am currently working to develop, correct, and expand upon the argument of Words without Objects, my Clarendon Press book of 2006. The project is an essay in the Philosophy of Matter, aiming at the integration of logico-semantic and ontological questions regarding matter.
HOMEPAGE HOMEPAGE HOMEPAGE
http://post.queensu.ca/~laycockh/index.html
PHILPAPERS PAGE
http://philpapers.org/profile/2901
OBJECTS, ONTOLOGY & STUFF
https://sites.google.com/site/henrylaycock/home
A RELATED ACADEMIC ISSUES PAGE: Mark Steen
http://sites.google.com/site/matterandobject/
The entries below indicate links between my logico / ontic interests and related foundational areas.
MATTER: Philosophy Ideas
http://www.philosophyideas.com/search/response_idea_theme.asp?find=theme&visit=1&ThemeNumber=1005&return=yes&theme_alpha=yes
LOGIC AND METAPHYSICS: A UCL REFERENCE WORK
http://www.ucl.ac.uk/philosophy/LPSG/L&M.htm
CONTINUUM MECHANICS
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuum_mechanics
QUANTUM FIELD THEORY
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_field_theory
In QFT, photons are not thought of as "little billiard balls" but are rather viewed as field quanta – necessarily chunked ripples in a field, or "excitations", that "look like" particles. Fermions, like the electron, can also be described as ripples/excitations in a field, where each kind of fermion has its own field. In summary, the classical visualisation of "everything is particles and fields", in quantum field theory, resolves into "everything is particles", which then resolves into "everything is fields". In the end, particles are regarded as excited states of a field (field quanta).
SMOOTH INFINITESIMAL ANALYSIS
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smooth_infinitesimal_analysis
Based on the ideas of the American mathematician F. W. Lawvere, and employing the methods of category theory, smooth infinitesimal analysis provides an image of the world in which the continuous is an autonomous notion, not explicable in terms of the discrete. It provides a rigorous framework for mathematical analysis in which every function between spaces is smooth (i.e., differentiable arbitrarily many times, and so in particular continuous) and in which the use of limits in defining the basic notions of the calculus is replaced by nilpotent infinitesimals, that is, of quantities so small (but not actually zero) that some power—most usefully, the square—vanishes. Smooth infinitesimal analysis embodies a concept of intensive magnitude in the form of infinitesimal tangent vectors to curves. Curves in smooth infinitesimal analysis are “locally straight” and accordingly may be conceived as being “composed of” infinitesimal straight lines in de l'Hôpital's sense, or as being “generated” by an infinitesimal tangent vector. The development of nonstandard and smooth infinitesimal analysis has supplied novel insights into the nature of the continuum.
ATOMIC ORBITALS
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_orbital
NOTICE ESPECIALLY this proviso: Within a visual context, atomic orbitals are the basic building blocks of the introductory pedagogical electron cloud model (derived from the wave mechanics model or atomic orbital model, BUT USING PARTICLE-CONCEPTS IN ORDER TO VISUALIZE the mathematical procedures used to approximate wave functions for atoms with many electrons).
POINT-FREE GEOMETRY
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Point-free_geometry
BIOLOGICAL TAXONOMY / METAPHYSICAL CATEGORIES
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxonomy_of_Life#Taxonomic_ranks
The name of the bow is life, but its work is death
To return to ancient things is to learn new ones
See what is not shown, hear what is not said
Calm water reflects the world
Asses prefer straw to gold
Avoid the full, fill the void
Too far East is West
PRIMARY INTEREST: LOGIC & ONTOLOGY OF STUFF OR MATTER - THE PHILOSOPHY OF MATTER, TERRAIN OF THE PRE-SOCRATICS. http://www.bilkent.edu.tr/~phil/invitees.htm
The pathways in this region of philosophy are not (to say the least) well trodden. However, writers whose interests significantly overlap my own include, among others, Jo
Supervisors: PETER STRAWSON, PAUL GRICE, A.J. AYER
Phone: 6135332182
Address: Department of Philosophy
Queen's University
Kingston
K7L3N6
To the waters and the wild
With a fairy hand-in-hand
For the world's more full of weeping
Than you can understand
W. B. YEATS
Alumnus, King James Grammar School
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_James%27s_Grammar_School,_Almondbury
'Our life on earth is, and ought to be, material and carnal. But we have not yet learned to manage our materialism and carnality properly; they are still entangled with the desire for ownership'. E. M. Forster
CATEGORIES. My interests are heavily focused on categories, in a traditional logico-metaphysical sense - and especially on categories (and the corresponding concepts) which seem to lie beyond the scope of the dominant 'substance' oriented categories. Among these, the semantical and metaphysical categories associated with so-called mass nouns are of particular interest. I am currently working to develop, correct, and expand upon the argument of Words without Objects, my Clarendon Press book of 2006. The project is an essay in the Philosophy of Matter, aiming at the integration of logico-semantic and ontological questions regarding matter.
HOMEPAGE HOMEPAGE HOMEPAGE
http://post.queensu.ca/~laycockh/index.html
PHILPAPERS PAGE
http://philpapers.org/profile/2901
OBJECTS, ONTOLOGY & STUFF
https://sites.google.com/site/henrylaycock/home
A RELATED ACADEMIC ISSUES PAGE: Mark Steen
http://sites.google.com/site/matterandobject/
The entries below indicate links between my logico / ontic interests and related foundational areas.
MATTER: Philosophy Ideas
http://www.philosophyideas.com/search/response_idea_theme.asp?find=theme&visit=1&ThemeNumber=1005&return=yes&theme_alpha=yes
LOGIC AND METAPHYSICS: A UCL REFERENCE WORK
http://www.ucl.ac.uk/philosophy/LPSG/L&M.htm
CONTINUUM MECHANICS
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuum_mechanics
QUANTUM FIELD THEORY
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_field_theory
In QFT, photons are not thought of as "little billiard balls" but are rather viewed as field quanta – necessarily chunked ripples in a field, or "excitations", that "look like" particles. Fermions, like the electron, can also be described as ripples/excitations in a field, where each kind of fermion has its own field. In summary, the classical visualisation of "everything is particles and fields", in quantum field theory, resolves into "everything is particles", which then resolves into "everything is fields". In the end, particles are regarded as excited states of a field (field quanta).
SMOOTH INFINITESIMAL ANALYSIS
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smooth_infinitesimal_analysis
Based on the ideas of the American mathematician F. W. Lawvere, and employing the methods of category theory, smooth infinitesimal analysis provides an image of the world in which the continuous is an autonomous notion, not explicable in terms of the discrete. It provides a rigorous framework for mathematical analysis in which every function between spaces is smooth (i.e., differentiable arbitrarily many times, and so in particular continuous) and in which the use of limits in defining the basic notions of the calculus is replaced by nilpotent infinitesimals, that is, of quantities so small (but not actually zero) that some power—most usefully, the square—vanishes. Smooth infinitesimal analysis embodies a concept of intensive magnitude in the form of infinitesimal tangent vectors to curves. Curves in smooth infinitesimal analysis are “locally straight” and accordingly may be conceived as being “composed of” infinitesimal straight lines in de l'Hôpital's sense, or as being “generated” by an infinitesimal tangent vector. The development of nonstandard and smooth infinitesimal analysis has supplied novel insights into the nature of the continuum.
ATOMIC ORBITALS
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_orbital
NOTICE ESPECIALLY this proviso: Within a visual context, atomic orbitals are the basic building blocks of the introductory pedagogical electron cloud model (derived from the wave mechanics model or atomic orbital model, BUT USING PARTICLE-CONCEPTS IN ORDER TO VISUALIZE the mathematical procedures used to approximate wave functions for atoms with many electrons).
POINT-FREE GEOMETRY
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Point-free_geometry
BIOLOGICAL TAXONOMY / METAPHYSICAL CATEGORIES
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxonomy_of_Life#Taxonomic_ranks
The name of the bow is life, but its work is death
To return to ancient things is to learn new ones
See what is not shown, hear what is not said
Calm water reflects the world
Asses prefer straw to gold
Avoid the full, fill the void
Too far East is West
PRIMARY INTEREST: LOGIC & ONTOLOGY OF STUFF OR MATTER - THE PHILOSOPHY OF MATTER, TERRAIN OF THE PRE-SOCRATICS. http://www.bilkent.edu.tr/~phil/invitees.htm
The pathways in this region of philosophy are not (to say the least) well trodden. However, writers whose interests significantly overlap my own include, among others, Jo
Supervisors: PETER STRAWSON, PAUL GRICE, A.J. AYER
Phone: 6135332182
Address: Department of Philosophy
Queen's University
Kingston
K7L3N6
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The cause of the huge decline is as yet unclear, although destruction of wild areas and widespread use of pesticides are the most likely factors and climate change may play a role. “The fact that the number of flying insects is decreasing at such a high rate in such a large area is an alarming discovery,” said Hans de Kroon, at Radboud University in the Netherlands and who led the new research.
“Insects make up about two-thirds of all life on Earth [but] there has been some kind of horrific decline,” said Prof Dave Goulson of Sussex University, UK, and part of the team behind the new study. “We appear to be making vast tracts of land inhospitable to most forms of life, and are currently on course for ecological Armageddon. If we lose the insects then everything is going to collapse.”
"The Monsanto Papers tell an alarming story of ghostwriting, scientific manipulation and the withholding of information," says Michael Baum, a partner in the law firm of Baum, Hedlund, Aristei & Goldman, which is bringing one of the US class actions. Monsanto used the same strategies as the tobacco industry, he says, "creating doubt, attacking people, doing ghostwriting."
Europe's farmers should consider the fate of Jack McCall, whose widow Teri is one of the U.S. plaintiffs. The California farmer had sprayed Roundup in his orchards for decades, often accompanied by his dog Duke. Duke died of lymphoma. McCall died of non-Hodgkin lymphoma a few years later.
The 1972 book Limits to Growth, which predicted our civilisation would probably collapse some time this century, has been criticised as doomsday fantasy since it was published. Back in 2002, self-styled environmental expert Bjorn Lomborg consigned it to the “dustbin of history”.
It doesn’t belong there. Research from the University of Melbourne has found the book’s forecasts are accurate, 40 years on. If we continue to track in line with the book’s scenario, expect the early stages of global collapse to start appearing soon.
Limits to Growth was commissioned by a think tank called the Club of Rome. Researchers working out of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, including husband-and-wife team Donella and Dennis Meadows, built a computer model to track the world’s economy and environment. Called World3, this computer model was cutting edge.
“We may be sitting on a precipice of a major extinction event,” McCauley says on the analysis, which has already received wide acclaim from marine biologists and experts in related fields. “If by the end of the century we’re not off the business-as-usual curve we are now, I honestly feel there’s not much hope for normal ecosystems in the ocean,” Palumbi said.
Current trends in ocean use suggest that habitat destruction is likely to become an increasingly dominant threat to ocean wildlife” the team said in their study. And because oceans are a fluid mechanism, and much more difficult to monitor accurately than land, there is practically no way of reaching a conclusion on the average state of Earth’s water. Some places could be far wars off than others, hence the importance of the new cumulative analysis.
The model, developed by a team at Anglia Ruskin University’s Global Sustainability Institute, does not account for any reaction to escalating crises by changing global behaviour. But the model shows that our current way of life is not sustainable and could have dramatic worldwide consequences.
“When bromide in the wastewater mixes with chlorine (often used at drinking water treatment plants), it produces trihalomethanes, chemicals that cause cancer and increase the risk of reproductive or developmental health problems,” the report notes. It also found that 450,000 tons of air pollutants can potentially be produced in one year by the practice.
Environment America, who published the report on Thursday, called fracking “highly polluting” and noted increasing numbers of documented cases of illness as a result of the practice. In addition to cancer, toxic substances from fracking chemicals and waste water can cause endocrine disruption, neurological problems and immune system problems.
“The numbers don't lie — fracking has taken a dirty and destructive toll on our environment. If this dirty drilling continues unchecked, these numbers will only get worse,” John Rumpler, a senior attorney for Environment America said in a news release after publication of the report.
Around the edge of the dome, sections of concrete have started to crack away. Underground, radioactive waste has already started to leach out of the crater: according to a report by the US Department of Energy, soil around the dome is already more contaminated than its contents.
Now locals, scientists and environmental activists fear that a storm surge, typhoon or other cataclysmic event brought on by climate change could tear the concrete mantel wide open, releasing its contents into the Pacific Ocean.
Evidence of a type of cancer called non-Hodgkin lymphoma, as seen in studies in the United States, Sweden and Canada conducted among farm workers since 2001.
Klein argues that the changes to our relationship with nature and one another that are required to respond to the climate crisis humanely should not be viewed as grim penance, but rather as a kind of gift—a catalyst to transform broken economic and cultural priorities and to heal long-festering historical wounds. And she documents the inspiring movements that have already begun this process: communities that are not just refusing to be sites of further fossil fuel extraction but are building the next, regeneration-based economies right now.
in to live in the city every month (it is currently the fastest-growing city in Europe). In fact, Montpellier was recently voted France's most popular city to live in - thanks to its beautiful and relaxed 'Centre Historique' centre, chic shops and close proximity to the beach.
13.4% of Languedoc-Roussillon, located in the southernmost part of the region, is a collection of five historical Catalan pays, from east to west: Roussillon, Vallespir, Conflent, Capcir, and Cerdagne, all of which are now part of the department of Pyrénées-Orientales. These pays were part of the Ancien Régime province of Roussillon, owning its name to the largest and most populous of the five pays, Roussillon. "Province of Roussillon and adjacent lands of Cerdagne" was indeed the name that was officially used after the area became French in 1659, based on the historical division of the five pays between the county of Roussillon (Roussillon and Vallespir) and the county of Cerdagne (Cerdagne, Capcir, and Conflent).
Maison Carrée: this exquisitely preserved Roman temple strikes a timeless balance between symmetry and whimsy, purity of line and richness of decor. Modeled on the Temple to Apollo in Rome, adorned with magnificent marble columns and elegant pediment, the Maison Carrée remains one of the most noble surviving structures of ancient Roman civilization anywhere. Built around 5 BC and dedicated to Caius Caesar and his grandson Lucius, the temple has survived subsequent use as a medieval meeting hall, an Augustine church, a storehouse for Revolutionary archives, and a horse shed. Temporary art and photo exhibitions are held here, and among a permanent display of photos and drawings of ongoing archaeological work is a splendid ancient Roman fresco of Cassandra (being dragged by her hair by a hunter) that was discovered in 1992 and carefully restored.
http://www.ot-nimes.fr/index.php
With one of the best-preserved Roman amphitheaters in the world and a near-perfect Roman temple, Nîmes beats out Arles for the title of "French City Best Able to Cash In on the Roman Empire's Former Glory." Although the ancient ruins always take center-ring, keep in mind that this town also has other allurements, including refurbished medieval streets and a calendar rich in cultural events."
Les Halles, Nîmes’ covered food market, is a delight. http://www.leshallesdenimes.com/histoire.php
Clean, bright and colorful with a wide range of produce, dairy, meat and fish it is a great place to shop for provisions, take photos, or just watch the locals do their thing. Vendors are generally friendly and patient with foreigners. Although technically open every morning there is very little activity on Monday mornings, Saturdays are very busy, Sundays too, especially for Arlette's vibrant bistrot! By 1pm it’s usually all over.""
....... Le Gard possède une histoire très dense. De la conquête romaine à nos jours, les conflits sociaux se sont multipliés et ont gravé à tout jamais l'identité et la culture des gardois. La Renaissance a divisé les languedociens et cévenols avec les guerres de Religions entre catholiques et protestants,...
Par décision de Monsieur Philippe Martin, Ministre en charge de l'Écologie et du Développement durable, en date du 17 janvier 2014, la Camargue gardoise a reçu le label Grand Site de France. La Camargue Gardoise devient ainsi le 14ème Grand Site de France. Ce label récompense le travail de plusieurs...
The abrivado - a bull-running festival that has escaped the opposition to bull-fighting - is under way. The festival in Sauve lasts three days and includes collective village meals, a fun fair and live music, well into the night.
"This is all part of our annual fete," said Gil Jose, a cafe owner in Sauve, a medieval village north-west of Nimes where many street signs are in the ancient Occitan language. "You'll see it in many villages in this region in summer, but there's no comparison to bull-fighting."
The abrivado is a unique and highly popular bull-running festival, demonstrating the skills of horsemen and the bravery of young men against agile, long-horned Camargue bulls.
On Thursday, WHO relief workers reported “unbearable” scenes in two hospitals they visited in northern Gaza: Bedridden patients with untreated wounds crying out for water, the few remaining doctors and nurses having no supplies, and bodies being lined up in the courtyard.
Within Israeli discourse, the assertion seems to have become routine, while it remains radioactive in the West: energetic pro-Israel activists scrutinize the media, the academy and the polity, ready to declare anti-Semitism or incitement at any use of the word.
The cause of the huge decline is as yet unclear, although destruction of wild areas and widespread use of pesticides are the most likely factors and climate change may play a role. “The fact that the number of flying insects is decreasing at such a high rate in such a large area is an alarming discovery,” said Hans de Kroon, at Radboud University in the Netherlands and who led the new research.
“Insects make up about two-thirds of all life on Earth [but] there has been some kind of horrific decline,” said Prof Dave Goulson of Sussex University, UK, and part of the team behind the new study. “We appear to be making vast tracts of land inhospitable to most forms of life, and are currently on course for ecological Armageddon. If we lose the insects then everything is going to collapse.”
"The Monsanto Papers tell an alarming story of ghostwriting, scientific manipulation and the withholding of information," says Michael Baum, a partner in the law firm of Baum, Hedlund, Aristei & Goldman, which is bringing one of the US class actions. Monsanto used the same strategies as the tobacco industry, he says, "creating doubt, attacking people, doing ghostwriting."
Europe's farmers should consider the fate of Jack McCall, whose widow Teri is one of the U.S. plaintiffs. The California farmer had sprayed Roundup in his orchards for decades, often accompanied by his dog Duke. Duke died of lymphoma. McCall died of non-Hodgkin lymphoma a few years later.
The 1972 book Limits to Growth, which predicted our civilisation would probably collapse some time this century, has been criticised as doomsday fantasy since it was published. Back in 2002, self-styled environmental expert Bjorn Lomborg consigned it to the “dustbin of history”.
It doesn’t belong there. Research from the University of Melbourne has found the book’s forecasts are accurate, 40 years on. If we continue to track in line with the book’s scenario, expect the early stages of global collapse to start appearing soon.
Limits to Growth was commissioned by a think tank called the Club of Rome. Researchers working out of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, including husband-and-wife team Donella and Dennis Meadows, built a computer model to track the world’s economy and environment. Called World3, this computer model was cutting edge.
“We may be sitting on a precipice of a major extinction event,” McCauley says on the analysis, which has already received wide acclaim from marine biologists and experts in related fields. “If by the end of the century we’re not off the business-as-usual curve we are now, I honestly feel there’s not much hope for normal ecosystems in the ocean,” Palumbi said.
Current trends in ocean use suggest that habitat destruction is likely to become an increasingly dominant threat to ocean wildlife” the team said in their study. And because oceans are a fluid mechanism, and much more difficult to monitor accurately than land, there is practically no way of reaching a conclusion on the average state of Earth’s water. Some places could be far wars off than others, hence the importance of the new cumulative analysis.
The model, developed by a team at Anglia Ruskin University’s Global Sustainability Institute, does not account for any reaction to escalating crises by changing global behaviour. But the model shows that our current way of life is not sustainable and could have dramatic worldwide consequences.
“When bromide in the wastewater mixes with chlorine (often used at drinking water treatment plants), it produces trihalomethanes, chemicals that cause cancer and increase the risk of reproductive or developmental health problems,” the report notes. It also found that 450,000 tons of air pollutants can potentially be produced in one year by the practice.
Environment America, who published the report on Thursday, called fracking “highly polluting” and noted increasing numbers of documented cases of illness as a result of the practice. In addition to cancer, toxic substances from fracking chemicals and waste water can cause endocrine disruption, neurological problems and immune system problems.
“The numbers don't lie — fracking has taken a dirty and destructive toll on our environment. If this dirty drilling continues unchecked, these numbers will only get worse,” John Rumpler, a senior attorney for Environment America said in a news release after publication of the report.
Around the edge of the dome, sections of concrete have started to crack away. Underground, radioactive waste has already started to leach out of the crater: according to a report by the US Department of Energy, soil around the dome is already more contaminated than its contents.
Now locals, scientists and environmental activists fear that a storm surge, typhoon or other cataclysmic event brought on by climate change could tear the concrete mantel wide open, releasing its contents into the Pacific Ocean.
Evidence of a type of cancer called non-Hodgkin lymphoma, as seen in studies in the United States, Sweden and Canada conducted among farm workers since 2001.
Klein argues that the changes to our relationship with nature and one another that are required to respond to the climate crisis humanely should not be viewed as grim penance, but rather as a kind of gift—a catalyst to transform broken economic and cultural priorities and to heal long-festering historical wounds. And she documents the inspiring movements that have already begun this process: communities that are not just refusing to be sites of further fossil fuel extraction but are building the next, regeneration-based economies right now.
in to live in the city every month (it is currently the fastest-growing city in Europe). In fact, Montpellier was recently voted France's most popular city to live in - thanks to its beautiful and relaxed 'Centre Historique' centre, chic shops and close proximity to the beach.
13.4% of Languedoc-Roussillon, located in the southernmost part of the region, is a collection of five historical Catalan pays, from east to west: Roussillon, Vallespir, Conflent, Capcir, and Cerdagne, all of which are now part of the department of Pyrénées-Orientales. These pays were part of the Ancien Régime province of Roussillon, owning its name to the largest and most populous of the five pays, Roussillon. "Province of Roussillon and adjacent lands of Cerdagne" was indeed the name that was officially used after the area became French in 1659, based on the historical division of the five pays between the county of Roussillon (Roussillon and Vallespir) and the county of Cerdagne (Cerdagne, Capcir, and Conflent).
Maison Carrée: this exquisitely preserved Roman temple strikes a timeless balance between symmetry and whimsy, purity of line and richness of decor. Modeled on the Temple to Apollo in Rome, adorned with magnificent marble columns and elegant pediment, the Maison Carrée remains one of the most noble surviving structures of ancient Roman civilization anywhere. Built around 5 BC and dedicated to Caius Caesar and his grandson Lucius, the temple has survived subsequent use as a medieval meeting hall, an Augustine church, a storehouse for Revolutionary archives, and a horse shed. Temporary art and photo exhibitions are held here, and among a permanent display of photos and drawings of ongoing archaeological work is a splendid ancient Roman fresco of Cassandra (being dragged by her hair by a hunter) that was discovered in 1992 and carefully restored.
http://www.ot-nimes.fr/index.php
With one of the best-preserved Roman amphitheaters in the world and a near-perfect Roman temple, Nîmes beats out Arles for the title of "French City Best Able to Cash In on the Roman Empire's Former Glory." Although the ancient ruins always take center-ring, keep in mind that this town also has other allurements, including refurbished medieval streets and a calendar rich in cultural events."
Les Halles, Nîmes’ covered food market, is a delight. http://www.leshallesdenimes.com/histoire.php
Clean, bright and colorful with a wide range of produce, dairy, meat and fish it is a great place to shop for provisions, take photos, or just watch the locals do their thing. Vendors are generally friendly and patient with foreigners. Although technically open every morning there is very little activity on Monday mornings, Saturdays are very busy, Sundays too, especially for Arlette's vibrant bistrot! By 1pm it’s usually all over.""
....... Le Gard possède une histoire très dense. De la conquête romaine à nos jours, les conflits sociaux se sont multipliés et ont gravé à tout jamais l'identité et la culture des gardois. La Renaissance a divisé les languedociens et cévenols avec les guerres de Religions entre catholiques et protestants,...
Par décision de Monsieur Philippe Martin, Ministre en charge de l'Écologie et du Développement durable, en date du 17 janvier 2014, la Camargue gardoise a reçu le label Grand Site de France. La Camargue Gardoise devient ainsi le 14ème Grand Site de France. Ce label récompense le travail de plusieurs...
The abrivado - a bull-running festival that has escaped the opposition to bull-fighting - is under way. The festival in Sauve lasts three days and includes collective village meals, a fun fair and live music, well into the night.
"This is all part of our annual fete," said Gil Jose, a cafe owner in Sauve, a medieval village north-west of Nimes where many street signs are in the ancient Occitan language. "You'll see it in many villages in this region in summer, but there's no comparison to bull-fighting."
The abrivado is a unique and highly popular bull-running festival, demonstrating the skills of horsemen and the bravery of young men against agile, long-horned Camargue bulls.
On Thursday, WHO relief workers reported “unbearable” scenes in two hospitals they visited in northern Gaza: Bedridden patients with untreated wounds crying out for water, the few remaining doctors and nurses having no supplies, and bodies being lined up in the courtyard.
Within Israeli discourse, the assertion seems to have become routine, while it remains radioactive in the West: energetic pro-Israel activists scrutinize the media, the academy and the polity, ready to declare anti-Semitism or incitement at any use of the word.
Although it wasn't the first time Curry, an African-American philosophy professor at Texas A&M University, had received death threats, he was shocked by the "constant barrage" of messages threatening his life and those of his wife and children.
Curry says he received threats that said: "You and your family of African baboons might need to get killed" and "Crackers are coming to get your black ass."
It all started after a seven-year-old podcast in which he discussed the history of slave rebellions and black self-defence against white supremacy in the United States, suddenly resurfaced on right-wing news sites and blogs.
Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention Relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War states: "The Occupying Power shall not deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies." The Hague Convention on the laws of war also forbids occupying powers from making permanent changes in the occupied territory unless it is a military necessity.
Virtually the entire international community, including the United Nations Security Council, the International Court of Justice, the International Committee of the Red Cross, and human rights organizations such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, consider Israel’s settlement enterprise to be illegal. Official American policy also does not recognize the legality of settlements, although for political reasons US officials normally refer to them as “illegitimate” rather than illegal.
The judges, who included Australia's Dr Helen Jarvis, considered the testimonies of expert witnesses and survivors and charges brought forward by six international prosecutors based on a report by more than 40 researchers.
They found the US supplied lists of the names of officials from the now defunct Communist Party of Indonesia (PKI), when there was a strong presumption this would lead to their arrest and/or execution.
"The UK and Australia conducted a sustained campaign repeating false propaganda from the Indonesian army, and that they continued with this policy even after it had become abundantly clear that killings and other crimes against humanity were taking place on a mass and indiscriminate basis," the tribunal's findings, released on July 20, said.
divestment and sanctions (BDS) campaign against Israel since its inception 10 years ago – said the experience of seeing himself constantly labelled a Nazi and anti-Semite had scared people into silence. “The only response to BDS is that it is anti-Semitic,” Waters says in his first major interview about his commitment to Israeli activism. “I know this because I have been accused of being a Nazi and an anti-Semite for the past 10 years.
“My industry has been particularly recalcitrant in even raising a voice [against Israel]. There’s me and Elvis Costello, Brian Eno, Manic Street Preachers, one or two others, but there’s nobody in the United States where I live.
In 2002, the American Psychological Association (APA) revised its code of ethics to allow practitioners to follow the “governing legal authority” in situations that seemed at odds with their duties as health professionals. Many argue that the revision, as well as a task force report in 2005 that affirmed that the code allowed psychologists to participate in national security interrogations, gave the Bush administration critical legal cover for torture.
Even after the video was silently erased from social media, however, the song remained a subject of discussion and controversy. Many across the world were shocked to see children sing happily about “eliminating” an entire people “within one year”. Yet a closer look at Israeli literature and curricula shows this open celebration of genocide was the only natural outcome of Israel’s persistent indoctrination – or brainwashing to be more blunt – of its children to ensure that they do not view Palestinians as human and fully embrace apartheid and occupation.
Much of the blame for the past year’s unprecedented uptick in violence—Palestinian deaths are at their highest levels in nearly two decades—belongs to the IDF’s “Breaking the Wave” operation, which has been carrying out near-daily actions since March 2022. Israel claims these raids are designed to 'neutralize terrorists' and squelch armed Palestinian opposition, which has already taken the lives of eleven Israelis since the start of this year. Factor in the increase of violence committed by Israeli settlers and the growing despair felt by angry young Palestinians in the West Bank, and further mayhem is all but assured
In 2006, a report was issued on the war in Lebanon, where for virtually the first time in its history the Israel Defense Forces realized that it was not infallible or invincible. Israeli generals suddenly realized that they did not have carte blanche in the region. Hezbollah inflicted serious casualties and amounts of damage, and southern Lebanon was devastated by the Israelis and the Lebanese people were again the victims, but the game had changed.
Israel's response at the time was initially to send in groups of Special Forces, backed by fleets of attack helicopters. They were certainly less than efficient and their intelligence was flawed, they had no idea how well trained and dug-in Hezbollah soldiers were, and they were over-confident. Allowing troops to take cell phones with them into Lebanon, for example, was absurdly slack.
Ominous signs now that the next war in the Middle East is coming, and it won't be pretty..................
The next war in north Lebanon will likely involve prolonged artillery attacks followed by massive infantry and tank infiltration. It will not be pretty. And it's likely to happen sooner rather than later, and directly or indirectly involve Iran, Saudi Arabia, Syria, and even Russia.
What Israel has done now in this period is to establish an apartheid structure where the Jews rule over Palestinians and exploit them in different ways: as a minority within Israel, as an occupied people within West Bank and Gaza, as a refugee population in the Arab world, and as involuntary exiles in the other parts of the world.
The Palestinian issue is still central to the identity of Israel. There is a sense that Israel has always wanted to be seen as a democratic country as well as a Jewish state. That’s been part of the problem because you can’t be both Jewish and democratic and then govern a majority of the non-Jewish population. They won’t accept that as a democratic country.
The second is that cooler heads eventually prevail in the US, Trump is forced out, and Republicans are held somewhat accountable for their support of a madman. Under this scenario, the worst policy stumbles of the Trump regime are at least partially unwound, and the US somewhat recovers from this very un-glorious moment.
The third possibility is that the US economy and society is so badly wounded by Trumpism that it never recovers and other nations recognise and avoid such blunders. These countries may move on to be the world's new global economic powers. Under this scenario, American capitalism will be remembered as an era - an age abruptly ended by a backward president.
Legal capitalism has learned from criminal capitalism that in the world of money, only rule-breakers survive. Drug traffickers were the pioneers of a free market model that has been slowly adopted by the legal economy.
Cocaine combined all of the pillars of contemporary capitalism: speed, globalization and economic power. Nowhere is this synthesis better in display than in offshore tax havens
History tells us that societies with extractive and self-serving upper classes tend to fall into decline – whereas societies with inclusive elites are more likely to thrive. With the rise of Trump, we’re seeing what an unraveling of the social fabric looks like after decades in which nearly all the nation’s income gains have flowed upwards to a tiny sliver of households.
Rarely has the American experiment – the notion of a country united by ideas rather than shared heritage – felt more fragile than it does right now. It’s an ugly picture of division and resentment, but a predictable one given the economic trauma inflicted on millions of people over recent decades.
.... When the president of Harvard University declared that to criticise Israel at this time and to call on universities to divest from Israel are ‘actions that are in effect, if not their intent’, anti-semitic he introduced a distinction between effective and intentional anti-semitism that is controversial at best. The counter-charge has been that in making his statement, Summers has struck a blow against academic freedom, in effect, if not in intent. The president of Harvard badly needs to define 'semite' and also to try hard to understand the huge difference between anti-semitism and anti-Zionism.
If the overall incidence of violence, including 21st century terrorism, is now relatively low compared to earlier global threats and conflicts, why has the United States responded by becoming an increasingly militarized, secretive, unaccountable, and intrusive “national security state”?
Is it really possible that a patchwork of non-state adversaries that do not possess massive firepower or follow traditional rules of engagement has, as the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff declared in 2013, made the world more threatening than ever?
For those who do not believe this to be the case, possible explanations for the accelerating militarization of the United States come from many directions. Paranoia may be part of the American DNA...
Terrorism is political invective, nothing more. It's a great favourite of demagogues, widely accepted by audiences, and is almost always applied exclusively to the other, never to ourselves.
Ten years ago, two American researchers caused a stir by performing a computer simulation of a US attack on Russia and publishing their findings in Foreign Affairs. According to the article, Washington possessed the capability to eliminate Russia's nuclear capability -- to destroy all of the country's atomic weapons -- with a single strike using bombers, intercontinental ballistic missiles or cruise missiles. The central message of the article was that the age of nuclear deterrence had come to an end -- an era in which both sides had to fear annihilation in the event of a nuclear attack because of the certainty of a retaliatory strike from the opponent. Instead of "Mutual Assured Destruction," the piece argued that the US was about to achieve nuclear primacy.
The emails document for the first time the questionable sources from whom Breedlove was getting his information. He had exaggerated Russian activities in eastern Ukraine with the overt goal of delivering weapons to Kiev.
The general and his likeminded colleagues perceived US President Barack Obama, the commander-in-chief of all American forces, as well as German Chancellor Angela Merkel as obstacles. Obama and Merkel were being "politically naive & counter-productive" in their calls for de-escalation
Israel rejects all forms of resistance (armed and peaceful) to its occupation and colonisation of Palestine, which is approaching half a century - the longest military occupation in modern history.
The only scenario it will accept is Palestinians' total submission to their subjugation. For Israel, the "peace process" is about 'process' over peace -- what it seeks is not peace but pacification.
..... THE new interim president, Michel Temer, was an embassy informant for US intelligence, WikiLeaks has revealed. According to the whistleblowing website, Temer communicated with the US embassy in Brazil via telegram, and such content would be classified as "sensitive" and "for official use only." Two cables were released, dated January 11, 2006 and June 21, 2006.
One shows a document sent from Sao Paolo, Brazil, to - among other recipients - the US Southern Command in Miami. In it, Temer discusses the political situation in Brazil during the presidency of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. Temer shared scenarios in which his party (PMDB) would win the elections.
George W. Bush made the case (prepared for him by national security adviser Condoleezza Rice) for preventive war in a speech at the U.S. Military Academy on June 1, 2002: “If we wait for threats to fully materialize, we will have waited too long.”
In the United States there exists a loyal cadre of intellectuals and pundits favoring war after war, laying the moral ground for invasions and excusing them when they go wrong. When American imperium was collapsing in Indochina, the guardians of American exceptionalism renewed their case for preserving the U.S. as the exception to international law. An article by Robert Tucker in Commentary set the ball rolling with the proposition that “to insist that before using force one must exhaust all other remedies is little more than the functional equivalent of accepting chaos.” Another evangelist for military action, Miles Ignotus, wrote in Harper’s two months later that the U.S. with Israel’s help must prepare to seize Saudi Arabia’s oilfields. Miles Ignotus, Latin for “unknown soldier,” turned out to be the known civilian and Pentagon consultant Edward Luttwak, who urged a “revolution” in warfare doctrine toward “fast, light forces to penetrate the enemy’s vital centers” with Saudi Arabia a test case. The practical test would come, with results familiar to most of the world, 27 years later in Iraq.
Semantics of the new linguistic boundless. The ontic phenomenon of boundlessness is partially made manifest in the linguistic phenomenon of mass nouns, called by the linguist Bloomfield (1933) unbounded nouns, across very many human languages. Nonetheless, I’ll urge that boundlessness is best conceived theoretically by reference to the more inclusive semantic category of the non-singular, including mass and plural nouns alike (the singular, by contrast, in the nature of the case, is always bounded and determinate). Furthermore, while nouns are peculiarly associated with the grammatical category of subjects, a fuller grasp of boundlessness requires a kindred focus also on the predicates. In particular, there is a crucial link between semantical non-singularity in nouns and verbal aspect among predicates – specifically, the imperfective aspect in the form of process-predicates. But further, this is one of two contrasting ways in which non-singular nouns relate to predicates: both non-singular subjects, and the aspectual properties of predicates, can take either of two forms – bounded and unbounded, and it is the combination of the two unbounded forms in which the boundless of matter is made manifest. "
http://www.sfb991.uni-duesseldorf.de/countability-workshop/
Henry Laycock - What’s wrong with the standard semantic model for mass nouns? ............................................................................................
1a. We would like to have an explanation of the distinctive behaviour, including morphosyntactic properties, of mass nouns. Only this can afford us understanding of their behaviour.
1b. The only kind of theory which offers explanations is a realistic theory or model (a model therefore only in a sense remote from that of so-called ‘model theory’) – one which grounds the phenomena in the actual underlying meanings or semantic properties of the relevant class of words and natural language sentences. A realistic theory must be capable in principle of providing a systematic and coherent account of all logically significant contexts in which the nouns occur, including the use of NL quantifiers, determiners, and verbs or predicate forms.
2. The one key principle for adequately explaining the behaviour of mass nouns is this: that they are semantically non-singular and so, do not denote individual ‘quantities’ or mereological objects. The contrary assumption can provide no account of many aspects of their behaviour. What are commonly mistaken for singular features of mass nouns – most obviously, the absence of both the plurality morpheme ‘-s’ and plural forms of verbs, as well as the use of determiners like ‘this’ and ‘that’ – belong in reality to a non-plural subgroup of the non-singular semantic features of these nouns. A mass noun lacks a range of objects, countables or distinct units for its extension."
It is to the linguist, Otto Jespersen, that we owe both our formal recognition of the lexical classes of mass and count nouns, and our adoption of the matching terminology of ‘mass’ and ‘count’. It is also largely to Jespersen, I believe, that we owe our growing awareness of the problematic nature of this category. In a much-quoted passage, Jespersen speaks of the these nouns as words for substances, and of the latter nouns as words for things:
There are a great many words which do not call up the idea of some definite thing with a certain shape or precise limits. I call these ‘mass-words’; they may be either material, in which case they denote some substance in itself independent of form, such as ... water, butter, gas, air, etc., or else immaterial, such as ... success, tact, commonsense, and ... satisfaction, admiration, refinement, from verbs, or ... restlessness, justice, safety, constancy, from adjectives’.
Things, we tend to feel, are quite well understood – such things as chairs and tables, cats and dogs, are prominent in everyday experience; and the ideas of such things are all, as Jespersen puts it, ideas of definite things with certain shapes or precise limits. But what sort of ideas are those of substances such as water, air, and butter – substances ‘in themselves, and independent of form’, what Jespersen calls uncountables? Precisely because these ideas are not those of ‘definite things with a certain shape or precise limits’, imagination seems here to face a certain discomfort. Is it perhaps a condition of adequate imaginings, that what is thus imagined should have a certain shape or limits? Now Jespersen’s ‘idea’ is a notoriously ambiguous term; but it is concepts, rather than images, that are essentially expressed in language, and these are also what we ultimately seek to understand.
Jespersen’s focus is upon linguistic structures, and in connection with mass nouns, he speaks explicitly of the need for an ideal language to represent these nouns – a language, in fact, which would be ‘constructed on purely logical principles’. Furthermore, in such a language, he suggests, a distinctive logical form would be called for, ‘when we left the world of countables (such as houses, horses, days, miles, sounds, words, crimes, plans, mistakes, etc.) and got to the world of uncountables’. Jespersens’s seminal discourse is no less cryptic than intriguing, but the bulk of his writing on the topic has suffered from a wholly undeserved neglect. For us, of course, the fact that an ideal language ‘constructed on purely logical principles’ had already been conceived, some fifty years earlier, is not news, although Jespersen himself seems to have been unaware of this. The key breakthrough of Frege’s Begriffsschrift, created with a view to the analysis of statements about the realm of numbers famously consists in replacing an Aristotelian subject / predicate treatment of sentences with a formalism based on the mathematical duality of function and argument. And it goes without saying that this mathematicisation of logic represented by Frege – subsequently, by Russell, Tarski and others – has become a key instrument within analytical philosophy, invoked in the treatment of a great variety of problems and issues. And no domain better illustrates the fact than contemporary ontology itself. As Quine quite rightly emphasizes, the ontic scope of modern logic is effectively defined by the bond between ontology and the variable: ‘Existence’, he maintains, ‘is what existential quantification expresses’.
However exactly we are to understand ‘the problem’ of mass nouns, this issue, or group of issues, seems to be relatively new within philosophy. In fact, it occupies a growing academic space in the inter-disciplinary regions overlapping logic, ontology, computing, linguistics, cognitive science, and the philosophy of language. But, insofar as there is a philosophically central issue here, that issue appears to have come into focus, precisely in light of Frege’s pre-existing formal framework. It is then hardly surprising that just this framework would tend to be invoked – albeit to address a problem whose very existence, as I think, is generated largely by the framework itself.
There are the very best of reasons for the recent surge of interest in mass nouns and the mass / count contrast. If what I am urging is not fundamentally in error, the issue cuts into the core of what our current concept-script is all about.
An expanded work which will replace this has been added, entitled 'THIS WATER'.
This work contrasts two semantic categories – those of concrete, so-called ‘mass’ and count nouns – with the pair of ontic categories, or highly general concepts, which these two groups of nouns express. These underlying concepts I shall call the object-concept and the matter-concept. Typically, the problems in this area are seen as chiefly problems about mass nouns, and perhaps the matter-concept; the object-concept, in contrast, is regarded as well-understood, and substantially encoded in our standard formal logic. But this conception of the situation is itself mistaken: the categories of mass and count nouns, although mutually exclusive, are internally related, and the difficulties over mass nouns stem in the main from difficulties over count nouns – and especially, from problems with the underlying ontic concept – that of objects, units, individuals or things, which this range of nouns express. The central problem is not one of mass nouns, and Frege’s question in particular – the question of ‘what we are here calling an object’ – is not, I think, well put.
Concepts are distinct from their semantical embodiments, and insufficient scrutiny is paid to the diversity of forms in which the object-concept is linguistically embodied or expressed. In fact, the range of sentence-types which standard logic recognises is limited in ways which effectively block access to the matter-concept and the object-concept equally. The fact that singularity is the sole semantic category of the predicate calculus imposes a constraint which is simply incompatible with formalising sentences involving non-singular reference or predication. And unlike the object-concept, the matter-concept represents a category which completely falls outside the scope of logic, in the form in which the latter is at present understood.
One central feature of the modern ‘concept-script’ consists in its well-founded rejection of the subject/predicate sentential form as universal. On the replacement model of language that comes to us from Frege, sentences are instead divided into two broad categories. On the one hand are fully-fledged, directly referential sentences which do exemplify the subject/predicate model – in semantic terms, the object/concept model – and on the other hand are quantified sentences which do not, but are constructed on the basis of the former group. This second group is indirectly referential; bound variables take directly referential terms as their substituends.
Now general concepts in themselves, of course, are never referential; reference enters in their use or application in constructing sentence-types and tokens. And an understanding of the concepts here at issue calls for recognition of a further, very different sentence-group. This group, involving bare occurrences of mass and count nouns equally, consists of existentially committed sentences which are unquantized – neither indirectly nor directly referential. Sentences of this non-referential, ‘feature-placing’ type are, I argue, the most basic form in which the matter-concept and the object-concept are linguistically expressed. For the object-concept, this form is ontically if not semantically supervenient on the possibility of references to things. But for the central classes of the matter-concept, the possibility of underlying references to stuff or matter seems deeply problematic. An understanding of these sentences calls, among other things, for understanding predications which are both essentially non-singular and involve the lexically progressive aspect.
*Consumer caution: contents may contain traces of invalidity and falsehood
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The problem comes into focus due to Frege’s pre-existing formal framework. Frege’s basic ‘formula language modelled upon that of arithmetic, for pure thought’ makes the principles of identity and countability structurally fundamental to the entire logical enterprise. Variables necessarily require countables (‘objects’) as values – yet as Jespersen notes, mass words designate ‘uncountables’....
Philosophy (especially empiricism, less so rationalism) has never been comfortable with matter, as compared with objects – Aristotle’s substances are an enduring metaphysical paradigm – but Jespersen has forced us to face the issue in its pure logical form – and we have only just begun to do so. Jespersen said: ‘Mass-words are totally different, logically they are neither singular nor plural, because what they stand for is not countable’. Unaware of this, I have developed the principle in the form of a series of tableaux, reproduced in the paper. Fundamental is that mass nouns are non-singular, proving that they do not denote a special ‘formless’ type of object exemplifying a mereology.
The existential assertion ‘There is water here’ sets no boundaries on the presence of water; the statement is not quantified; it does not imply that there is any identifiable thing or object here. Consider how to formalize the existential statements ‘Water is dripping from the roof’and ‘Water is pouring through cracks in the dam’, involving 'boundless’ processes without an end-point.
Concepts of stuff like water are concept of undifferentiated stuff with no built-in identity. There may be water here and water there; it may be warm here and cold there, dirty here and clean there, but it has no intrinsically differentiating features. The difference between the water here and the water there need be absolutely nothing over and above the difference between here and there – the difference between two places where water can be found. Distinctness and identity, or quantity and reference – the difference between this amount of stuff and that – are arbitrary or adventitious principles, external to the category of stuff itself.
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Must the water of each and every separate raindrop, falling into lakes and rivers, continue to exist as somehow separate and distinct, however much that water might diffuse or mingle with the rest, or has it irretrievably lost its identity, and merged or ‘fused’ into the waters of the world? In this talk I examine a specific process, mixing, and its result, mixtures, with a view to illuminating a metaphysical distinction between two different categories of being.
Categories, in this philosophical sense, are highly general abstract, or non-empirical, concepts, and in a way to be explained, category-theory is an aspect of logic. Everyday empirical concepts, such as the concepts of tea and coffee, or dogs and cats, all fall within such abstract formal concepts, and exemplify their formal structures. When the linguist Otto Jespersen noticed a distinction between what he called words for substances and words for things:, he was making a distinction between just such abstract formal categories or concepts.
Jespersen wrote:
There are a great many words which do not call up the idea of some definite thing with a certain shape or precise limits. I call these ‘mass-words’; they may be either material, in which case they denote some substance in itself independent of form, such as … water, butter, gas, air, etc., or else immaterial, such as … success, tact, commonsense, and … satisfaction, admiration, refinement, from verbs, or … restlessness, justice, safety, constancy, from adjectives’.
In a tradition going back to Aristotle, the world is represented as fundamentally a world of discrete objects, individuals or things. But thinking about mixture, and taking Jespersen seriously, we can better understand what is wrong with this influential, object-oriented picture.
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Countability Workshop - Background
- Multidisciplinary workshop which addresses theoretical and empirical issues (i) in the study of the mass/count distinction in the nominal domain, and (ii) the parallel distinction(s) in the verbal domain September 16-17, 2013 With the support of the Collaborative Research Center and the Department of Linguistics, Heinrich-Heine-University Düsseldorf, German.
Invited Speakers
David Barner (University of California at San Diego)
Jenny Doetjes (Leiden University)
Scott Grimm (Pompeu Fabra University)
Manfred Krifka (Humboldt University
Fred Landman (Tel Aviv University)
Henry Laycock (Queen's University Canada)
Susan Rothstein (Bar Ilan University)
Tobias Stadtfeld (Bochum University)
Roberto Zamparelli (University of Trento)
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1. Matter as an abstraction. Hegel: “matter is the mere abstract or indeterminate reflection- into-something-else; it is consequently Thinghood which then and there is, – the subsistence of the thing”. Russell: Matter or materiality itself, the class-concept, is among the terms which do not exist, but bits of matter exist both in time and in space. Two material units ... agree in having the relation of inclusion in a class to the general concept matter, or rather to the general concept material unit. Matter itself seems to be a collective name for all pieces of matter, as space for all points and time for all instants.
2. Matter as a dependent constituent of concrete objects: Aristotle. By “material” I mean that which is in itself not a particular thing or a quantity or anything else by which things are defined. For there is something of which each of these is predicated and whose being is different from that of any of the predicates. Everything else is predicated of primary being; whereas primary being must be predicated of being-a-material. Hence, in the last analysis a subject is itself not a particular something or quantity or anything of the sort... It follows from these considerations that primary being is material. But this is incompatible with what we have said about primary being as ‘a something’ – something in particular.
3. Matter as composed of concrete objects: Democritus – matter is made up of very small particles which cannot be divided (namely, ‘atoms’ or Atomos) – and is ‘nothing but’ these constituents. John Dalton, 19th Century chemist. Henry Laycock, ‘Some Questions of Ontology’ – ‘mass nouns’ are plural count nouns in disguise.
4. Matter is itself a concrete object: Quine – two versions. (i) ‘Water’ is the singular name of a vast scattered object whose parts are bits of water. (ii) ‘water’ is a common noun for portions, parcels, or bits of water. Helen Cartwright – more sophisticated version of this view. Followed by many ( Peter Hacker, Tyler Burge, Terence Parsons, Vere Chappell, etc etc).
5. Relationships between these views. Views 1 and 2 may be compatible, and both distinguish the concept of matter from the concept of object. Views 3 and 4 are reductionist, and subsume the concept of matter under the object-concept.
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""Motto : Crapula ingenium offuscat. Traduction : "le bec du perroquet qu'il essuie, quoiqu'il soit net" (Pascal, Pensées, L : 6/107).
http://semaihp.blogspot.fr/
Ce blog est ouvert pour faire connaître les activités d'un groupe de recherches, le Séminaire de métaphysique d'Aix en Provence (ou SEMa). Créé fin 2004, ce séminaire est un lieu d'échanges et de propositions. Accueilli par l'IHP (EA 3276) à l'Université d'Aix Marseille (AMU), il est animé par Jean-Maurice Monnoyer, bien que ce blog lui-même ait été mis en place par ses étudiants le 4 mai 2013.
Thèmes de recherche : Métaphysique analytique, Histoire de la philosophie classique, moderne et contemporaine, Métaphysique de la cognition et de la perception. Méta-esthétique. Philosophie du réalisme scientifique.
"""
Some 54% of liberal Democrats say climate scientists understand the causes of climate change very well. This compares with only 11% among conservative Republicans and 19% among moderate/liberal Republicans.
Liberal Democrats, more than any other party/ideology group, perceive widespread consensus among climate scientists about the causes of warming. Only 16% of conservative Republicans say almost all scientists agree on this, compared with 55% of liberal Democrats.
The credibility of climate research is closely tied with Americans’ political views. Some 55% of liberal Democrats say climate research reflects the best available evidence most of the time, 39% say some of the time. By contrast, 9% of conservative Republicans say this occurs most of the time, 54% say it occurs some of the time.
On the flip side, conservative Republicans are more inclined to say climate research findings are influenced by scientists’ desire to advance their careers (57%) or their own political leanings (54%) most of the time. Small minorities of liberal Democrats say either influence occurs most of the time (16% and 11%, respectively).
“Mr. Castro brought the Cold War to the Western Hemisphere, bedeviled 11 American presidents and briefly pushed the world to the brink of nuclear war.”
Let’s look for a moment at one piece of this unintentional humor: just who brought the Cold War to this hemisphere? A few years before the Cuban revolution, Washington overthrew the democratically elected government of Guatemala under the false pretext that it was a beachhead of Soviet Communism in the hemisphere. This ushered in nearly four decades of dictatorship and horrific state violence, which the UN later determined was genocide. In 1999, President Bill Clinton would apologize for the US role in this genocide.
But what vindicates Castro’s view ― and most of the world’s interpretation ― of the US-Cuban conflict, even more than the first four decades of the US embargo and other interventions against Cuba, is what has happened in Latin America in the 21st century. In this era, left governments came to power through democratic elections on a scale that had never happened before. First Venezuela, then Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, Bolivia, Honduras, Chile, Nicaragua, Ecuador, Paraguay, and El Salvador elected, and in some countries re-elected, left governments. A number of the new presidents had been persecuted, jailed, or tortured under US-supported dictatorships. And all of them had the same view as Fidel Castro of the United States’ role in Latin America.
The National Literacy Campaign. In 1961, in what Oxfam described as "one of the most successful initiatives of its kind, Castro mobilized teachers, workers, and secondary school students to teach more than 700,000 persons how to read." By 1962 -- just three years after the revolution -- Cuba's literacy rate was 96 per cent, one of the highest in the world. Since then, Cuba has dispatched literacy volunteers to other under-developed countries to improve their literacy. Cuba has a higher literacy rate than Canada.
Cuban public health care is the best in the developing world. Cuba has 90,000 physicians, more than in Canada. On a per capita basis they have three times more than we do. The infant mortality rate is lower than it is in Canada, and life expectancy is about the same. Cuba also produces 70 per cent of its own medicines, and so the prices are a fraction of what we pay.
Cuban Medical Internationalism. Today, there are 55,000 Cuban medical personnel in 67 different countries, responding to every kind of natural disaster and health crisis -- from earthquakes to Ebola. That is more than is provided by all G-7 "developed" countries. At home, Cuba provided free long-term care for 26,000 victims of the Chernobyl disaster, mainly children.
The Latin American School of Medicine. Originally established in 1999 to educate students from poor countries to become doctors, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon has called it "the most advanced medical school in the world." A Fidel Castro initiative following the destruction wrought on the region by Hurricanes Mitch and Georges, ELAM has graduated more than 25,000 doctors from 120 countries. Students' education is totally free; their only obligation is to return to their own countries and practise in under-served communities.
A group of Italian professors and researchers are planning to boycott Israeli academic institutions, saying the schools are complicit in "violations of international law and human rights". Some 170 scholars from more than 50 Italian universities and research organisations have signed a pledge committing to the boycott. The signatories described themselves as "a solid critical block of scholars" who were "no longer willing to tolerate Israeli academic complicity with Israel's state violence". "The utter lack of any serious condemnation on their part since the foundation of the state of Israel led to the initiative," the authors said in a statement. The academics-who teach and work at prominent universities, including the University of Bologna, the University of Rome and the University of Milan-noted that they were part of a growing global trend of scholars taking a stand for Palestinian rights.
UK academics sever ties with Israeli universities "I think it is important that members of the Italian academia have joined the international boycott, because this is a sign that even in Italy, the BDS [boycott, divestment and sanctions] movement is becoming mainstream," Federico Zanettin, an associate professor of English and translation at the University of Perugia, told Al Jazeera.
Hundreds of university professors in the United Kingdom say they will halt all cooperation with Israeli schools in an effort to draw attention to Israel's violations of international law. In a statement released on Tuesday, 343 UK academics announced that they would no longer accept invitations to visit Israeli academic institutions, act as referees in any of their processes, or participate in conferences funded or organised by them.
Equally important, the stance they took on public issues mattered because it mobilised thousands of ordinary citizens to participate in political advocacy. Einstein consistently supported anti-war movements and highlighted the dangers of nuclear war while Picasso was a committed anti-fascist.
The world's greatest critical/oppositional intellectual who is still alive is undoubtedly MIT Professor Emeritus of Linguistics Noam Chomsky, and he clearly represents a dying breed. The reality is that, with small exceptions, today's Western world is dominated by functional/conformist intellectuals, thinkers whose mission is not to inform the public about social evils, abuses of power and the threat they pose to freedom, democracy, and dignity, but to enhance their own careers and material wealth by preserving and reproducing the existing order and the dominant power relations.
The very best thing about America is its kaleidoscopic diversity. We also brought you bourbon and jambalaya and popcorn and ice cream cones and clam chowder and brownies and pumpkin pie (and drones, Guantanamo, global privacy violation, global corporate domination, and the modern witch-hunt)
Tertiary education spending per student: $23,225 (2nd highest)
More than half of Canadian adults had received tertiary qualification in 2012 - the only country other than Russia where a majority of adults had some form of higher education. Canada’s education expenditure of $23,226 per student in 2011 trailed only the United States’ expenditure. Canadian students of all ages appear to be very well-educated. Secondary school students outperformed the majority of countries in mathematics on the PISA in 2012. And nearly 15% of adults in the country performed at the highest level of literacy proficiency, versus an OECD average of 12%.
Unfortunately, efforts by educational policymakers to address such conditions are often dictated by political expediency, rather than an overarching concern to safeguard quality education as the very foundation of democracy. The results have been educational ‘reforms’ that focus on standardized testing, performance-based teacher evaluations, and union-busting measures such as the privatization of public schools in the United States and back-to-work legislation in Canada. Across all public sectors, we are seeing political interventions that are stripping away labour rights in the name of fiscal responsibility during a period of economic vulnerability.
How long critical education can remain robust within institutional conditions that appear on the verge of collapsing to financial and ideological pressures is a serious concern. It seems that leadership in education has become a matter of educators not only teaching their students, but educating administrators and policymakers as well.
Educators are taking a more active role as defenders of public values both inside and outside of their own institutions. This is true with respect to communicating the importance of education rooted in democratic principles to the broader public as well as taking up issues of social justice and labour organizing. It is also true with respect to a growing mass of university researchers who prioritize connecting their work to policy circles and embracing collaborative opportunities to engage various sectors in the production and sharing of knowledge and practices related to pressing social issues.
Those working to organize within educational institutions can learn from the philosophies and interventions that have long guided community organizers and activists in the broader community. Educators should create spaces for mutual enrichment, such as a March 22, 2013 workshop facilitated by Chandra Talpade Mohanty on “being a scholar-activist” that brought together non-academic community organizers working in Hamilton with academic community organizers working at McMaster University. Regardless of institutional affiliation, people who believe in working for a more just and equitable world through public education will find there is much more bringing them together than driving them apart.
Forging opportunities for cross-sectoral knowledge exchange, community building, and solidarity on local, national, and transnational levels is one promising approach that appears to be moving forward through the dedicated efforts of engaged scholars, despite slow or no encouragement from educational institutions and their leaders.
Educators should also create spaces for young scholars to be involved in the politics and decision-making structures within their schools as well as in the civic life of their broader communities. Yet equally important will be for students and teachers to join together in supporting those key leaders within public and higher education who are in the right positions to voice a collective vision of education as a site that supports human agency, equity, and dignity, rather than only statistics and ‘measurable impact.’
The theme of this year's meeting is "Traces, Tidemarks and Legacies." I am listening to the speaker bemoan the exploitative practices of the neoliberal model when a friend of mine taps me on the shoulder. "I spent almost my entire salary to be here," she says.
My friend is an adjunct. She has a PhD in anthropology and teaches at a university, where she is paid $2100 per course. While she is a professor, she is not a Professor. She is, like 67 per cent of American university faculty, a part-time employee on a contract that may or may not be renewed each semester. She receives no benefits or health care.
According to the Adjunct Project, a crowdsourced website revealing adjunct wages - data which universities have long kept under wraps - her salary is about average.
If she taught five classes a year, a typical full-time faculty course load, she would make $10,500, well below the poverty line. Some adjuncts make more. I have one friend who was offered $5000 per course, but he turned it down and requested less so that his children would still qualify for food stamps.
Whilst working in the ochre pits, a group of young diggers unearth a giant foot, surrounded by all manner of strange objects made of unknown materials and having no conceivable use.
The Great Oracle – ‘Germain the Omiscient’ is summoned to decipher the mystery.
“You have unwittingly stumbled across a ‘Landfill’ – Sacred Burial Ground of The Cult of Consumerism.”
According to folklore passed down from generation to generation, the cult spread like wildfire across the globe, leaving nothing but a trail of devastation in its wake. Monolithic centres of worship called, ‘Shopping Malls’ were erected in every village. The Mall was a place for devotees to satiate their spiritual cravings. They crammed every corner of their palatial homes with religious icons. The most revered deity of the cult was Imelda – the Goddess of Stuff; a semi-mythical being that loved the poor and down trodden, whom she would grace with her presence, dressed in all her splendour. It was said she owned a pair of shoes for every day of the year. On a lofty hill above The Sacred Burial Ground a magnificent statue was erected in her honour (see the uploaded file).
QUESTION: What is Quine's account of mass terms?
.............. And the way to approach this topic was given by the following suggestion:
................. Reconstruct Quine's thesis on this topic, and consider how it relates to the (very general concept or) category of matter
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Word_and_Object
http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/a/aristotle/categories/
http://www.ditext.com/russell/russell.html
http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/l/locke/john/l81u/
...........
http://semaihp.blogspot.fr/
Ce blog est ouvert pour faire connaître les activités d'un groupe de recherches, le Séminaire de métaphysique d'Aix en Provence (ou SEMa). Créé fin 2004, ce séminaire est un lieu d'échanges et de propositions. Accueilli par l'IHP (EA 3276) à l'Université d'Aix Marseille (AMU), il est animé par Jean-Maurice Monnoyer, bien que ce blog lui-même ait été mis en place par ses étudiants le 4 mai 2013.
Thèmes de recherche : Métaphysique analytique, Histoire de la philosophie classique, moderne et contemporaine, Métaphysique de la cognition et de la perception. Méta-esthétique. Philosophie du réalisme scientifique.
I am not a national security strategist or a military tactician,” Rendon said. “I am a politician, and a person who uses communication to meet public policy or corporate policy objectives. In fact, I am an information warrior and a perception manager.” He reminded the Air Force cadets that when victorious troops rolled into Kuwait City at the end of the first war in the Persian Gulf, they were greeted by hundreds of Kuwaitis waving small American flags. The scene, flashed around the world on television screens, sent the message that U.S. Marines were being welcomed in Kuwait as liberating heroes.
“Did you ever stop to wonder,” Rendon asked, “how the people of Kuwait City, after being held hostage for seven long and painful months, were able to get hand-held American, and for that matter, the flags of other coalition countries?” He paused for effect. “Well, you now know the answer. That was one of my jobs then.”
... Public relations firms often do their work behind the scenes....But his description of himself as a “perception manager” echoes the language of Pentagon planners, who define “perception management” as “actions to convey and (or) deny selected information and indicators to foreign audiences to influence their emotions, motives, and objective reasoning. ... In various ways, perception management combines truth projection, operations security, cover, and deception, and psyops [psychological operations].”
Explaining his decision to opt out of society, he says: "I meet a lot of good people, but for the most part people just care about themselves. You could be standing on the corner bleeding and people would just drive by you. They wouldn't want no part of the drama."
His companion asks "but what does that mean?" He replies: "The internet has become an idol. People don't want relationships."
He explains how people prefer to cultivate their online personas rather than build meaningful relationships with people around them.
His story is both tragic and touching — and may have some truth for everyone.
BUT...........
“When it comes to insults, your religion started this, not me,” the self-confessed killer wrote on Facebook. “If your religion kept its big mouth shut, so would I. But given that it doesn’t, and given the enormous harm that your religion has done in this world, I’d say that I have not only a right, but a duty, to insult it, as does every rational, thinking person on this planet.”
The dead women’s father, Dr. Mohammad Abu-Salha, who has a psychiatry practice in Clayton, said "this was execution style, a bullet in every head, It was not a dispute over a parking space; this was a hate crime. This man had picked on my daughter and her husband several times before, and he talked with them with his gun in his belt"
Your privacy is under attack! But this is a European company.
Every time you use a regular search engine, your search data is recorded. Major search engines capture your IP address and use tracking cookies to make a record of your search terms, the time of your visit, and the links you choose - then they store that information in a giant database.
Those searches reveal a shocking amount of personal information about you, such as your interests, family circumstances, political leanings, medical conditions, and more. This information is modern-day gold for marketers, government officials, black-hat hackers and criminals - all of whom would love to get their hands on your private search data.
Why should you worry?
Major search engines have quietly amassed the largest database of personal information on individuals ever collected. Unfortunately, this data can all too easily fall into the wrong hands. Consider the following story:
In August 2006, the online world was jarred when AOL accidentally released three months' worth of aggregated search data from 650,000 of its users, publishing all the details in an online database. That database is still searchable. It is an absolute eye-opener to see the potential for privacy nightmares. " CHECK BOTH LINKS!!
What is CounterPunch Magazine?
CounterPunch Magazine is 28 page publication solely for those who have paid for a CounterPunch Magazine subscription. It is published 10 times per year. The Magazine is available both in print form, sent by US Mail and as a digital edition emailed as a PDF or an ISSUU link for a virtual magazine for digital devices and computers. (PDFs are readable with Adobe Acrobat Reader which can be downloaded for free at www.adobe.com).
Furthermore, every single end device that is connected to the Internet somewhere in the world -- every smartphone, tablet and computer -- is to be made visible. Such a map doesn't just reveal one treasure. There are many millions of them.
The breathtaking mission is described in a Treasure Map presentation from the documents of the former intelligence service employee Edward Snowden. It instructs analysts to "map the entire Internet -- Any device, anywhere, all the time."
Treasure Map allows for the creation of an "interactive map of the global Internet" in "near real-time," the document notes. Employees of the so-called "FiveEyes" intelligence agencies from Great Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, which cooperate closely with the American agency NSA, can install and use the program on their own computers.
We are served by more than 50 correspondents and contributors in 25 Asian countries, the US, and Europe. Additional content is provided by news services and renowned think tank and investment analysts and academics.
Asia Times Online was founded at the beginning of 1999 and is incorporated and duly registered in Hong Kong. It derives its revenues from advertising, the resale of original content to other
publications and news services, and subscriptions to atimes.net.
Historically, in our publication policy and editorial outlook, we are the successor of Asia Times, the Hong Kong/ Bangkok-based daily print newspaper founded in 1995 and associated with the Manager Media Group, which had to cease publication in the summer of 1997 as a result of the Asian financial crisis. Like its predecessor, Asia Times Online gives its readers worldwide an overview of Asian news events, looking behind the headlines that are the staple of the news agencies and networks.
Asia Times Online is reaching a rapidly increasing global readership. Our readers are people of influence - investors, executives, diplomats, academics, journalists - who need to know about Asian political, economic and business affairs. We have become a "must read" for Westerners and Asians who do business with each other.
"I met with top British officials, who confessed to me that they were preparing something in Syria. This was in Britain not in America. Britain was preparing gunmen to invade Syria."
The 2011 uprisings, it would seem - triggered by a confluence of domestic energy shortages and climate-induced droughts which led to massive food price hikes - came at an opportune moment that was quickly exploited. Leaked emails from the private intelligence firm Stratfor including notes from a meeting with Pentagon officials confirmed US-UK training of Syrian opposition forces since 2011 aimed at eliciting "collapse" of Assad's regime "from within."
So what was this unfolding strategy to undermine Syria and Iran all about? According to retired NATO Secretary General Wesley Clark, a memo from the Office of the US Secretary of Defense just a few weeks after 9/11 revealed plans to "attack and destroy the governments in 7 countries in five years", starting with Iraq and moving on to "Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Iran." In a subsequent interview, Clark argues that this strategy is fundamentally about control of the region's vast oil and gas resources.
RT has a global reach of over 630 million people in 100+ countries, or more than 28% of all cable subscribers worldwide, and is now available in more than 2.7 million hotel rooms.
RT news covers the major issues of our time for viewers wishing to question more and delivers stories often missed by the mainstream media to create news with an edge. RT provides an alternative perspective on major global events, and acquaints international audience with the Russian viewpoint. RT is the winner of the 2013 Monte Carlo TV Festival Award for the best 24-hour newscast, for reporting on the Chelyabinsk meteor crash. In 2010, RT became the first Russian TV channel to be nominated for the prestigious International Emmy award in the News category. The network received its second News nomination, in 2012, for its coverage of the Occupy Wall Street movement.
The best of our broadcasts can be found on RT’s YouTube channel, which became the first TV news channel in YouTube’s history to reach one BILLION views. Described by YouTube as ‘astonishing’ and ‘one of the, if not the biggest news provider on YouTube worldwide,’ RT’s YouTube platform is core to the ongoing emphasis on multi-media news-delivery across the RT family.
In 2009, RT launched a unique project for media professionals: FreeVideo, Russia’s first English-language video agency, which gives users free online access to broadcast quality RT footage. In 2013 RT added RUPTLY, a full-service video agency that delivers original news footage from all the global hotspots, to its growing operation.
A national, non-partisan, and not-for-profit organization, E4D formed out of concern over recent government cuts to important science institutions, and policies that restrict the flow of scientific information to the public. Governments can be tempted to make decisions based on ideology or political convenience unless the public loudly demands that decisions be based on evidence.
Evidence for Democracy facilitates, organizes, and amplifies these demands through its education, monitoring, and advocacy campaigns.
The generation, collection, rigorous evaluation, and open communication of science is essential for informed public debate and a functioning democracy.
Our Vision:
Strong public policies built on the best available evidence for the health and prosperity of all Canadians.
A thriving democracy where citizens are informed and engaged, and all levels of government are both transparent and accountable.
A national culture that values science and evidence and the important role they play in our society.
government surveillance. The study entitled “Global chilling: The impact of Mass Surveillance on International Writers” surveyed 772 writers in 50 countries and concluded that writers and journalists are self-censoring for fear of reprisal.
A similar report published in November 2013 found that writers were “worried about mass surveillance, and were engaged in multiple forms of self-censorship as a
result.”
A full report from writers around the world will be issued in the spring of 2015. As writers are considered to be the “canaries in the coalmine” therefore they are likely to give an accurate picture of the impact of surveillance on privacy and freedom of expression.
Writers living in democratic countries were found to be nearly as concerned as those living in non-democratic states with long histories of mass surveillance.
Our Constitution and democratic system demand that government be transparent and accountable to the people, not the other way around. History has shown that powerful, secret surveillance tools will almost certainly be abused for political ends.
The ACLU has been at the forefront of the struggle to rein in the surveillance superstructure, which strikes at the core of our rights to privacy, free speech, and association. Read on to learn what we're doing to roll back the surveillance state.
The project is being developed by researchers at Indiana University, and its purported aim is to detect what they deem “social pollution”. What types of social pollution are they targeting? “Political smears,” so-called “astroturfing” and other forms of “misinformation.” Focusing in particular on political speech, Truthy estimates users’ “partisanship.” The team says this research could be used to “mitigate the diffusion of false and misleading ideas, detect
The practice of monitoring the whereabouts of Whisper users – including those who have expressly opted out of geolocation services – will alarm users, who are encouraged to disclose intimate details about their private and professional lives.
Whisper is also sharing information with the US Department of Defense gleaned from smartphones it knows are used from military bases, and developing a version of its app to conform with Chinese censorship laws.
The purpose of the information gathering is, in one rendering, to protect us from each other and ourselves. But it is also for the purpose of manipulation, to influence how we vote and spend and think. And so, people of a certain moral profile who have access to the information will be offended and some will risk liberty and life to let us in on what the institutions know about us.
That’s the way the world has worked since people first discovered the utility of information and the power of secrecy. In a memorable scene from the movie The Fifth Estate, a journalist opines that speeches in the British House of Commons were once so secret that people caught leaking them to the public were hanged for it. Not exactly true - but the Commons debates were conducted secretly, and people went to prison for reporting them in pamphlets. Public outrage, fired by whistleblowing, eventually put a stop to secrecy in parliament.
The modern pamphlet is a blog or tweet, the brown envelope is now a tiny thumb-drive with the information-carrying capacity of a truckload of paper documents. And from the opposing perspective, technology has also enabled institutions to delve deeply into private lives for law enforcement, commerce and the vague new project known as “public safety”.
The human tendency to be offended by abuse - torture in a secret prison, a lie told under oath to fool the public, squandering of public treasure - remains a vital force in conscientious people.
Technology has changed, but human nature hasn’t and that’s a good thing. The human tendency to be offended by abuse - torture in a secret prison, a lie told under oath to fool the public, squandering of public treasure - remains a vital force in conscientious people.
Surveillance is about generating power and control over individuals and groups. It prevents those with dangerous ideas or controversial opinions from speaking out. It hampers activism and quashes political dissent. It restricts the ability of the media and civil society to investigate and expose abuses of power.
Laws which enable secret, unaccountable surveillance undermine democratic principles and put human rights at risk. The actions of those who undertake surveillance are too often insulated from public scrutiny. For this reason, meticulous, rigorous research and investigation plays a pre-eminent role in advocating for stronger legal protections for privacy.
Synonyms of ‘intellectual’ in the Merriam-Webster Dictionary / Thesaurus:
cerebral, eggheaded, geeky, highbrow, highbrowed, intellectualist, intellectualistic, long-haired, nerdish, nerdy
Related Words:
cultivated, cultured, academic, bookish, professorial; didactic, high-toned, hyperintellectual, pedantic; high-hat, snobbish, snobby, snooty; educated, schooled; brainy.
They watch as we poison their water, as we kill a million acres of their crops. They must weep as the bulldozers roar through their areas preparing to destroy the precious trees. They wander into the hospitals, with at least twenty casualties from American firepower for one "Vietcong"-inflicted injury. So far we may have killed a million of them -- mostly children. They wander into the towns and see thousands of the children, homeless, without clothes, running in packs on the streets like animals. They see the children, degraded by our soldiers as they beg for food. They see the children selling their sisters to our soldiers, soliciting for their mothers.
What do the peasants think as we ally ourselves with the landlords and as we refuse to put any action into our many words concerning land reform? What do they think as we test our latest weapons on them, just as the Germans tested out new medicine and new tortures in the concentration camps of Europe? Where are the roots of the independent Vietnam we claim to be building? Is it among these voiceless ones?
We have destroyed their two most cherished institutions: the family and the village. We have destroyed their land and their crops. We have cooperated in the crushing of the nation's only non-Communist revolutionary political force -- the unified Buddhist church. We have supported the enemies of the peasants of Saigon. We have corrupted their women and children and killed their men. What liberators? """
(*After a pause.*) "Ye have prayed it; if ye still desire it, speak! The messenger of the Most High waits!"
However, while Microsoft promises control in the “geographical region” where data resides, the fact that our region is "The Americas" means that everything can be subject to surveillance by the United States National Security Agency (NSA).
http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/12/08/us-eu-privacy-nsa-idUSKBN0JM1M220141208
This lack of encryption is not an oversight on Microsoft's part; it is, in fact, part of their business strategy. In order to manage a shared calendar, the contents must not be encrypted, a practice which appears to violate the Faculty of Arts and Science's privacy policy. The policy includes the sentence "You must not remove any confidential student record in electronic format from the campus if they are on a nonencrypted device". Microsoft also inserts extra management content into documents, thus breaking their integrity.
Currently by using a Queen’s-based server, all internal and international email communication (except that to or from the United States) does not necessarily pass in its entirety through a server located in the U.S. nor is accessible by a U.S.-linked corporation. However, using Microsoft Office 365, all email (i.e. content, transaction data, attachments, and all linked information) would become subject to U.S. law, including provisions brought in through the Patriot Act and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Amendment Act. American law confers express statutory authority for prospective content surveillance of law-abiding individuals, with neither probable cause, nor a warrant, nor any suspicion of criminality. When police and security agencies request e-mail or other records to which U.S.-linked corporations have access, the corporation must not only comply but is prohibited from advising the individual that their records have been requested.
metaphysics and linguistics has resulted in a series of talks and addresses across Europe. In late December of 2012, he gave an invited keynote address at the conference, “Mass/Count in Linguistics, Philosophy and Cognitive Science” at the Sorbonne / École Normale Supérieure in Paris. In April of 2013, he gave an invited talk to the Philosoph-
ical Association of Lund, Sweden, on “The Metaphysics of Mixtures,” and a colloquium in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Lund on the semantics of mass nouns. Later in April, he was an Invited Visitor at the Department of Philosophy and the History of Ideas at Aarhus University, Denmark, giving a talk on “The Matter of Metachemistry,’”and leading a graduate seminar on his book, Words without Objects. During June, he gave two talks and ran a workshop
at Eidos, The Centre in Metaphysics of the University of Geneva. The conference topic was “The Metaphysics of Mixtures and Stuff.” He was an invited speaker in the Multidisciplinary September “Countability Workshop” at the Heinrich Heine University of Düsseldorf, and will also be speaking at the University of Oxford in December on the topic of “Pre-Socratic Metachemistry.”
"“To the French, we are not French,” one young Muslim said. “I am born here, of Tunisian parents, but I cannot go back because there, they call me French. But here, the French call me ‘other.’ We do not fit. They do not let us. I feel it. I live here. I work here. It is very difficult for us. "
If you want a sobering counterblast to the dominant mood in France, have a look at the "Je ne suis pas Charlie" Facebook page. It has received more than 21,000 likes in the last few days. The mainly Muslim French people who have given a thumbs-up to the page are not supporters of violence. The vast majority have no truck with the Kouachis and Coulibaly.
But they also make clear they will not take part in a national movement that backs people who insulted the Prophet Muhammad. Over and again they express their anger at what they see as double standards:
Why so much fuss over 17 dead when thousands have died in Gaza and Syria? And why is it all right for Charlie Hebdo to mock Islam when the controversial "comic" Dieudonne M'bala M'bala is prosecuted for mocking Jews? Why is one defined as "inciting hatred" and not the other?
While immigration from Muslim-majority countries has become an increasingly contentious issue in many Western countries, the experience of Canadian Muslims defies many of the stereotypes promulgated about this community. In his book, Unlikely Utopia: The Surprising Triumph of Canadian Pluralism, the Canadian author Michael Adams conducted one of the broadest studies of the Canadian Muslim population ever, and found a community which strongly identified with the country and its institutions. To this end, a 2007 CBC News poll concluded that "Canadian Muslims appear to be the most contented, moderate and, well, Canadian, in the developed world."
French society is based on money, profit, segregation and racism. In some suburbs, unemployment for people under 25 is 50%. You are marginalised because of your colour or your first name. You’re questioned 10 times a day, you’re crowded into apartment blocks and no one represents you. Who could live and thrive under such conditions?”
But. Canadians are certainly not Charlie. My guess - an English-language version of Charlie Hebdo wouldn't last even a few days in Canada before concerned Muslim or Christian or Jewish citizens would be demanding charges be laid under Canada's hate-speech laws, or dragging the magazine before one of our provincial human rights commissions that specialize in rooting out offensive expression.
Thus Quine -
"We persist in breaking reality down somehow into a multiplicity of identifiable and discriminable objects, to be referred to by singular and general terms'. W. V. O. Quine, 'Speaking of Objects'
On the other hand,, 'Seldom if ever does Nature operate in closed and separate compartments, and she has not done so in distributing the earth's water supply. Rain, falling on the land, settles down through pores and cracks in soil and rock, penetrating deeper and deeper until it reaches a zone where all the pores of rock are filled with water, a dark, subsurface sea, rising under the hills, sinking beneath valleys. This groundwater is always on the move, sometimes at a pace so slow that it travels no more than 50 feet a year, sometimes rapidly, by comparison, so that it moves nearly a tenth of a mile in a day. It travels by unseen waterways, until here and there it comes to the surface as a spring, or perhaps is tapped to feed a well. But mostly it contributes to streams and so to rivers. Except for what enters streams directly as rain or surface runoff, all the running water of the earth's surface was at one time groundwater. And so, in a very real and frightening sense, pollution of the groundwater is pollution of water everywhere'.
Rachel Carson, Silent Spring
Natural-language uses of 'object' are (unsurprisingly) diverse. The modest American College Dictionary, for example, contains some twelve entries for the term, among which appear the following: "something that may be perceived by the senses, especially by sight or touch", and again, "anything that may be presented to the mind: objects of thought." Of the two, the latter is plainly the more general use, and from a traditional logicometaphysical standpoint, it is also the more fundamental-perhaps the most fundamental of any. Just such a conception appears in The Principles of Mathematics, in a remark which will constitute the point of departure for the present commentary. In that work, Russell writes:
15
ntic model for mass nouns?
H ENRY LAYCOCK,
1a. We would like to have an explanation of the distinctive behaviour, including morpho-
syntactic properties, of mass nouns. Only this can afford us understanding of their
behaviour.
1b. The only kind of theory or model which can offer explanations and understandings is a
realistic theory one which grounds the phenomena in the actual underlying meanings or
semantic properties of words and sentences.
2. The one key principle for adequately explaining the behaviour of mass nouns is this: that
they are semantically non- mereological objects.
The contrary assumption provides no account whatever of many aspects of their behaviour.
What are commonly mistaken for singular features of mass nouns most obviously, the ab-
sence of the plurality morpheme and the use of determiner belong in reality to a non-plural subgroup of the non-singular semantic features of these nouns.
3. A systematic taxonomy of the key semantic features of both mass and count nouns, but not including semantic features of bare nouns, is represented in the central tableau I present.
efforts to understand what is involved in the idea of a simple, familiar object have generally been less than successful because of failure to take sufficiently seriously the idea of stuff. By "simple, familiar object" I intend things like lumps of sugar, drops of water, and pieces of iron-items designated generically perhaps
as "bits of stuff"-and I mean "stuff" in the conventional sense such that sugar, water, and iron will count as different types of stuff. Suggestions that there is really nothing to be understood here, since such simple objects are among the items conceptually basic to our ontology, will be argued to be essentially and fundamentally mistaken. It has been very commonly held-with the notable exception of some pre-Socratics-that the world is first and foremost a world of particular things, and that the idea of stuff is at best a "component" in the idea of a particular, distinguishable conceptually but inseparable physically from such a thing. Aristotle, for example, holds that though objects present a duality of matter and form, matter as such is merely potential, not actual. Surprisingly similar views are to be found in writers asdiverse as Russell, Hegel, and Strawson. It is a very puzzling sort of view
HENRY LAYCOCK
THEORIES OF MATTER
"Matter" may be defined, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, as "The substance, or the substances collectively, out of which a physical object is made or of which it consists". And while t he O.E.D. is not the ultimate authority on words, nor is it, I believe, far wrong in this particular case. The definition is, as I shall argue in this paper, in substantial harmony with a tradition of some antiquity, according to which material objects do not constitute a somehow 'fundamental category' for ontology; and it is in conflict with a more contemporary view which maintains precisely that they do. According to the older kind of view, material objects are in fact derivative from or dependent upon a more fundamental category of material stuff or matter, exemplified by the ancient 'elements ': earth, air, fire and water. "Most of those who first philosophised", says Aristotle at Metaphysics 983b, supposed that "that from wh ich all things come, that from which they first arise and into which at last they go... is elemental and primary in things". But serious obstacles have long appeared to confound the pla usible developmentof this kind of view, and it is with an examination of some of these that I shall primarily be
concerned in what follows.1