Manuel Doria

We discuss in an informal, general audience style the da Costa-Doria conjecture about the independence of the P = NP hypothesis and try to briefly assess its impact on practical situations in economics. The paper concludes with a discussion of the Coppe-Cosenza procedure, which is an approximate, partly heuristic algorithm for allocation problems.

Discussions on the nature of time are as old as philosophical inquiry itself, and have always riddled scientists and philosophers alike with its many perplexities. Twentieth century physics, entertaining us with theoretically feasible and actual phenomena such as ...

In order to ponder the question of (space) time, we consider exotic spacetimes in the sense of differential geometry, and then present undecidability and incompleteness results about general relativity, with the nature of time and the existence of some kind of "cosmic time" as central questions. We conclude with a discussion on the possible interpretation of our results.

I submit that epistemic progress in key areas of contemporary academic philosophy has been compromised by politically correct (" PC ") ideology. First, guided by an evolutionary account of ideology, results from social and cognitive psychology and formal philosophical methods, I expose evidence for political bias in contemporary Western academia and sketch a formalization for the contents of beliefs from the PC worldview taken to be of core importance, the theory of social oppression and the thesis of anthropological mental egalitarianism. Then, aided by discussions from contemporary epistemology on epistemic values, I model the problem of epistemic appraisal using the frameworks of multi-objective optimization theory and multi-criteria decision analysis and apply it to politically correct philosophy. I conclude that philosophy guided by politically correct values is bound to produce constructs that are less truth-conducive and that spurious values which are ideologically motivated should be abandoned. Objections to my framework stemming from contextual empiricism, the feminine voice in ethics and political philosophy are considered. I conclude by prescribing the epistemic value of empirical adequacy, the contextual value of political diversity and the moral virtue of moral courage to reverse unwarranted trends in academic philosophy due to PC ideology.