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Issues

Volume 3, Issue 1

April 7, 2017

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April 7, 2017

Critical Essays

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The Galilean Challenge
Noam Chomsky
[short_description] One of the most striking features of the human capacity for language is the use of finite means to express an unlimited array of thoughts. Accounting for this feature is the Galilean challenge.
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Trump and the Trumpists
Wolfgang Streeck
[short_description] Trumpism, according to Wolfgang Streeck, was a result of a global shift from classes to status groups, exacerbating social rifts between neoliberal urban elites and the traditional working class.
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The Last Threshold
Anne Dambricourt Malassé
[short_description] Understanding bipedalism in Homo sapiens as a result of the growing complexity of the nervous system, Anne Dambricourt Malassé argues, necessitates a new morpholical definition of our species.

Review Essays

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Gödel: The Third Degree
Graham Oppy
[short_description] Formulations of Gödel’s ontological argument in third-order modal logic, Grapham Oppy argues, allow us to decide between theistic and naturalistic positions.

Book Reviews

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How Things Hang Together
George Scialabba
[short_description] George Scialabba reviews Convergence: The Idea at the Heart of Science by Peter Watson, and his description of the progressive unification of the sciences.
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Decoding the Earliest Symbols
Ian Tattersall
[short_description] What are the abstract symbols found in many Ice Age caves? Ian Tattersall reviews Genevieve von Petzinger’s The First Signs: Unlocking the Mysteries of the World’s Oldest Symbols.
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Not Only Us
Cedric Boeckx
[short_description] In his review of Robert Berwick and Noam Chomsky’s Why Only Us, Cedric Boeckx argues for a fresh approach to the question at the heart of the book: “Are humans the only ones who possess language?”
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Fiat recursio!
David Lobina & Mark Brenchley
[short_description] Most accounts of Chomsky’s concept of recursion are wrong; clarifying it renders a new critique by Tom Wolfe irrelevant. David Lobina and Mark Brenchley review Tom Wolfe’s The Kingdom of Speech.
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Spheres
Pieter Lemmens
[short_description] From microspheres to macrospheres: Pieter Lemmens reviews German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk’s Foams: Plural Spherology, the conclusion of his vast and fascinating Spheres trilogy.
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The Lawless Frontier
Daniel Gelernter
[short_description] Rethinking Order: After the Laws of Nature, edited by Nancy Cartwright and Keith Ward, is a collection of recent essays about the philosophy of science. Daniel Gelernter offers a critical review.

Film Reviews

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Became, Become, Becoming
David Adger
[short_description] Concepts such as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis form the basis for both the film Arrival and the short story by Ted Chiang on which it is based. David Adger reviews the film and its ideas.

Experiment Reviews

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Skulls That Speak
Antoine Balzeau
[short_description] Antoine Balzeau review a recent paper that argues for a link between the development of human language and the evolving shape of the human skull.
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Higgs on the Moon
Adam Falkowski
[short_description] A hundred precision experiments or a one hundred-km collider? Adam Falkowski reviews recent results from the Large Hadron Collider and what they mean for the future of experimental particle physics.
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Natural Physics
Aurélien Barrau
[short_description] Recent results from the Large Hadron Collider showed no sign of any new physics and did not provide confirmation for supersymmetry. According to Aurélien Barrau, a fundamental rethink is in order.

Letters to the Editors

######### Card Letter *XXX* ######### On the Madelung Rule
Eric Scerri
[short_description] Can chemistry be reduced to physics? Eric Scerri argues that philosophers of science have done chemistry a disservice in neglecting the field that pulls the sciences together.
######### Card Letter *XXX* ######### Chemistry Self-Crystallizing
Pierre Laszlo
[short_description] Physicists and chemists have been helping one another since World War II. Among all the proposed structural tools, nuclear magnetic resonance has played a prominent role.
######### Card Letter *XXX* ######### A Cold Cup of Coffee
Bruno Courcelle
[short_description] The bitcoin system might have a ludic interest, but what more? Bruno Courcelle weighs up the practical aspects of the cryptocurrency.
######### Card Letter *XXX* ######### On the Governance of Bitcoin
Gérard Dréan
[short_description] The bitcoin network has evolved in such a way that the distribution of governance has become asymmetric. If users wish to live under different rules, they automatically form a separate community.
######### Card Letter *XXX* ######### Looking to the Future
Jean-Michel Kantor
[short_description] The future prospects of bitcoin depend on overcoming a complex mixture of technical, legal, and societal factors, which should be analyzed by different interdisciplinary research groups.
######### Card Letter *XXX* ######### On the Origins of Currencies
René Lozi
[short_description] In reflecting upon the bitcoin phenomenon, it is necessary to return to the definition of what a currency is. René Lozi recounts the history of money, and what this means for cryptocurrencies.
######### Card Letter *XXX* ######### From Bitcoin to Ethereum
Aurélien Alvarez
[short_description] Ethereum represents an important first step in the new vision of a decentralized web. Could this new technology provide tools to invent new forms of democracy?
######### Card Letter *XXX* ######### Shining a Light on Cognition
Fred Adams
[short_description] Is a belief synonymous with an intention? Fred Adams finds some overlap, but cognitive science is far too complicated for such easy definitions.
######### Card Letter *XXX* ######### On Cognitive Dissonance
Gilles Dryancour
[short_description] Individuals do not easily change their minds. In economics, societies have recourse to two solutions: hierarchy, where the leader decides, and markets, where voluntary exchanges are key.
######### Card Letter *XXX* ######### Alchemy and Accountability
Emmanuel Martin
[short_description] In a free system such as the market economy, the first level of regulation is not exogenous government regulation, it is endogenous accountability. How does endogenous regulation work?
######### Card Letter *XXX* ######### Economic Models and the Crisis
Alain Boublil
[short_description] Disequilibria in private finances could not have been accounted for in the lead up to the economic crisis of 2008. This was why economists had not seen anything coming.
######### Card Letter *XXX* ######### Fault Lines in Monetary Economics
Scott Sumner
[short_description] The Great Depression was misdiagnosed in the 1930s, with modern opinion dramatically different to that at the time. How long will it be before the Great Recession faces a similar reckoning?
######### Card Letter *XXX* ######### Economies are Ecologies, not Engines
Richard Wagner
[short_description] An economy is a system of agents and connections among those agents. There are, however, two distinct ways of conceptualizing economic systems. One is mechanical, the other is ecological.
######### Card Letter *XXX* ######### Central Banks and Limiting Risk
Vincent Bénard
[short_description] Should central banks be responsible for preventing bank failures? Accountability needs to be put in place, so that all participants in the system would have something to lose if things went wrong.
######### Card Letter *XXX* ######### Stay, Illusion!
Drieu Godefridi
[short_description] From quantitative easing to endless reductions in interest rates, central banks have become prisoners of their own Keynesian logic. They are imagining, and even enacting, radically coercive measures.
######### Card Letter *XXX* ######### The View from Below
Yves Montenay
[short_description] In business, projects are judged not on the basis of cash flow, but on their profitability, whether regarding a case of investment in the traditional sense of the term, or of organizational expenses.
######### Card Letter *XXX* ######### A Platonic Paradox
John Colarusso
[short_description] In the late 1970s, John Colarusso sent a letter to Noam Chomsky to point out the difficulties faced by Chomsky’s language acquisition device. Colarusso comes back to this letter, some forty years on.
######### Card Letter *XXX* ######### Linguistic Archaeology
Mark Leone
[short_description] An archaeologist of Christianity explores how linguistics might be linked to his field, and finds the common core to be an imaginary world, reached through worldly means.
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