One of the enduring concerns of moral philosophy is deciding who or what is deserving of ethical consideration. Much recent attention has been devoted to the "animal question" -- consideration of the moral status of nonhuman animals. In this book, David Gunkel takes up the "machine question": whether and to what extent...
Some TIME ago a group of mathematicians and computer scientists (including the editors
of this volume) thought of making a scientific pilgrimage to the birthplace of al-Khw&rizmf,
the outstanding ninth-century mathematician who gave his name to the word "algorithm".
As his name indicates, al-Khwarizmi came from the Khorezm...
Word sense disambiguation is a core research problem in computational
linguistics, which was recognized at the beginning of the scientific interest
in machine translation and artificial intelligence. And yet no book has been
fully devoted to review the wide variety of approaches to solving the problem.
The time is right for such a...
From the prizewinning author of HHhH, “the most insolent novel of the year” (L’Express) is a romp through the French intelligentsia of the twentieth century.
Paris, 1980. The literary critic Roland Barthes diesâstruck by a laundry vanâafter lunch with the presidential...
Humans use language to convey meaningful messages to each other. Linguistic competence consists in the ability to express meaning reliably, not simply to obtain faithful lexical transcriptions. This invaluable reference tool is the product of many years' experience and research on language and speech technology. It presents the motivations for,...
This new edition of the widely read Evolution in Four Dimensions has been revised to reflect the spate of new discoveries in biology since the book was first published in 2005, offering corrections, an updated bibliography, and a substantial new chapter. Eva Jablonka and Marion Lamb's pioneering argument proposes that there is more...
The essays offer a unified and comprehensive view of 17th century mathematical and metaphysical disputes over status of infinitesimals, particularly the question whether they were real or mere fictions. Leibnizs development of the calculus and his understanding of its metaphysical foundation are taken as both a point of departure and a...
The problem of approximating a given quantity is one of the oldest challenges faced by mathematicians. Its increasing importance in contemporary mathematics has created an entirely new area known as Approximation Theory. The modern theory was initially developed along two divergent schools of thought: the Eastern or Russian group, employing...
Awareness of mortality is the price of intelligent consciousness. This book argues that a person is essentially an immaterial subject of conscious states who, though intimately linked by causal ties to the body, is nevertheless distinct from it. The book also examines apparently paranormal occurrences supporting the belief that some persons...
"Williams's masterful translation satisfies (at last!) a long-standing need. There are lots of good translations of Augustine's great work, but until now we have been forced to choose between those that strive to replicate in English something of the majesty and beauty of Augustine's Latin style and those that opt instead...
Begriffsschrift was, as the subtitle announced, a formula language of pure thought modeled upon the language of arithmetic. Frege borrowed the notation for functions from arithmetic, and enlarged the realm of applicability of a function beyond the domain of numbers. Then, supplanting the subject/predicate division, which was...
