While creativity plays an important role in the advancement of computer science, great ideas are built on a foundation of practical experience and knowledge. This book presents programming techniques which will be useful in both AI projects and more conventional software engineering endeavors. My primary goal is to enter- tain, to introduce new technologies and to provide reusable software modules for the computer programmer who enjoys using programs as models for solutions to hard and interesting problems. If this book succeeds in entertaining, then it will certainly also educate. I selected...

The present monograph is devoted to the complex theory of differential equations. Not yet a handbook, neither a simple collection of articles, the book is a first attempt to present a more or less detailed exposition of a young but promising branch of mathematics, that is, the complex theory of partial differential equations. Let us try to describe the framework of this theory. First, simple examples show that solutions of differential equations are, as a rule, ramifying analytic functions. and, hence, are not regular near points of their ramification. Second, bearing in mind these important...

This book is a systematic history of one of the oldest problems in the philosophy of space and time: How is the change from one state to its opposite to be described? To my knowledge it is the first comprehensive book providing information about and analysis of texts on this topic throughout the ages. The target audience I envisaged are advanced students and scholars of analytic philosophy and the history of philosophy who are interested in the philosophy of space and time. Authors treated in this book range from Plato, Aristotle, the logicians of the late Middle Ages, Kant, Brentano and...

Discussions about the nature of the emotions in Hellenistic philosophy have aroused intense scholarly interest over the last few years. The topics covered by the essays in this volume range from the classical background of Hellenistic theories, through debates on emotion in the major Hellenistic schools, to discussions in later antiquity. Special emphasis is placed on the development of the Stoic views on the nature and value of the emotions. The essays are written with a high level of philosophical and classical scholarship, but contain no exclusive technicalities.
Audience: ...

The 11 essays collected here have been composed by members of the North American Spinoza Society. They exhibit the fruits of the research, investigation and erudition of an array of established scholars and newer students whose interpretations of Spinoza's philosophical doctrines are receiving critical acclaim.
This is the first collection in the English language dedicated exclusively to topics, problems or questions raised by the teachings found in Baruch Spinoza's Tractatus theologico-politicus.
Divided into the themes of piety, peace, and the freedom to philosophize,...

This volume brings together a number of authors that see themselves as contribu tors to, or critical commentators on, a new field that has recently emerged within the sociology of knowledge. This new field is 'the Sociology of Philosophical Knowledge' (SPK). Studying philosophers and their knowledge from broadly sociological or political perspectives is not, of course, a recent phenomenon. Marxist writers have used such perspectives throughout the twentieth century, and, since the sixties, feminist authors have also occasionally engaged in sociological analysis of philosophers' texts. What...

Abelard is one of the foremost protagonists of the "twelfth-century Renaissance." He 'picks up the baton' from Boethius resuming the activity of commenting on Aristotle's works. The present book focuses on the logical-grammatical analysis of natural language, which for Abelard is a fragment of "scientific Latin." Tools of modern categorial grammar are employed to clarify many of the problems raised by historiography (such as meaning, abstract entities and universals). Among the merits of the volume is the fact that it has enlightened the radical interplay between the traditions of Aristotle's...

On the most basic level, the articles brought together in the present volume aim to contribute to the charting of the (often subtle) links between the medieval and early modern periods in the fields of metaphysics, philosophical theology, and modal theory. In selecting this line of inquiry the volume is consciously intended to offer support for the stance that in the higher or speculative sciences no sharp divide exists between the later Middle Ages, on the one hand, and the Renaissance and early modern period, on the other. In adopting such an approach, one emphasizing historical continuity...

This book discusses three linguistic projects carried out in the seventeenth century: the artificial languages created by Dalgamo and Wilkins, and Leibniz's uncompleted scheme. It treats each of the projects as self- contained undertakings, which deserve to be studied and judged in their own right. For this reason, the two artificial languages, as well as Leib- niz's work in this area, are described in considerable detail. At the same time, the characteristics of these schemes are linked with their intellectual context, and their multiple interrelations are examined at some length. In this...

In the Critique of Judgment, Kant argues that feeling is part of the system of the mind. Judgments of taste based on feeling are a unique kind of judgment, and the feeling that is their foundation forms an independent third power of the mind. Feeling has a special role within this system in that it also provides a transition between the other two powers of the mind, cognition and desire.
Matthews argues that feeling, our experience of beauty, provides a transition because it orients humans in a sensible world. Judgments of taste help overcome the difficulties that arise when...