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Neurobiology of Human Values
Man has been pondering for centuries over the basis of his own ethical and aesthetic values. Until recent times, such issues were primarily fed by the thinking of philosophers, moralists and theologists, or by the findings of historians or sociologists relating to universality or variations in these values within various populations. Science has avoided this field of investigation within the confines of philosophy. Beyond the temptation to stay away from the field of knowledge science may also have felt itself unconcerned by the study of human values for a simple heuristic reason, namely the lack of tools allowing objective study. For the same reason, researchers tended to avoid the study of feelings or consciousness until, over the past two decades, this became a focus of interest for many neuroscientists
Missions of universities : Past, present, future
provides an analysis of university missions over time and space. It starts out by presenting a governance framework focusing on the demands on universities set by regulators, market actors and scrutinizers. It examines organizational structures, population development, the fundamental tasks of universities, and internal governance structures. Next, offers a discussion of the idea and role of universities in society, exploring concepts such as autonomy and universality, and the university as a transformative institute. The next four chapters deal with the development of universities from medieval times, through the Renaissance, towards the research universities in the nineteenth century in Europe and the United States.
Geometry of Müntz Spaces and Related Questions
Starting point and motivation for this volume is the classical Muentz theorem which states that the space of all polynomials on the unit interval, whose exponents have too many gaps, is no longer dense in the space of all continuous functions. The resulting spaces of Muentz polynomials are largely unexplored as far as the Banach space geometry is concerned and deserve the attention that the authors arouse. They present the known theorems and prove new results concerning, for example, the isomorphic and isometric classification and the existence of bases in these spaces. Moreover they state many open problems. Although the viewpoint is that of the geometry of Banach spaces they only assume that the reader is familiar with basic functional analysis. In the first part of the book the Banach spaces notions are systematically introduced and are later on applied for Muentz spaces. They include the opening and inclination of subspaces, bases and bounded approximation properties and versions of universality.
From Suns to Life: : A Chronological Approach to the History of Life on Earth
This review emerged from several interdisciplinary meetings and schools gathering a group of astronomers, geologists, biologists, and chemists, attempting to share their specialized knowledge around a common question: how did life emerge on Earth? Their ultimate goal was to provide some kind of answer as a prerequisite to an even more demanding question: is life universal? The main chapters of this review present the formation and evolution of the solar system (3); the building of a habitable planet (4); prebiotic chemistry, biochemistry, and the emergence of life (5); the environmental context of the early Earth (6); and the ancient fossil record and early evolution (7). The concluding chapter (9) provides the highlights of the review and presents the different points of view about the universality of life. Two pedagogical chapters are included; one on chronometers (2), another in the form of a "frieze" (8) which summarizes in graphical form the present state of knowledge about the chronology of the emergence of life on Earth, before the Cambrian explosion.
Machines, Computations, and Universality ; 5th International Conference, MCU 2007, Orleans, France, September 10-13, 2007, Proceedings
The 18 revised full papers presented together with nine invited papers cover Turing machines, register machines, word processing, cellular automata, tiling of the plane, neural networks, molecular computations, BSS machines, infinite cellular automata, real machines, and quantum computing.
Machines, Computations, and Universality ; 4th International Conference, MCU 2004, Saint Petersburg, Russia, September 21-24, 2004, Revised Selected Papers
Constitutes the post-proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Machines, Computations, and Universality, MCU 2004, held in St Petersburg, Russia in September 2004. This book covers a variety of foundational aspects in theoretical computer science such as cellular automata, molecular computing, quantum computing, and formal languages
Analogy in Indian and western philosophical thought
This book was assembled from numerous excerpts, notes, and fragments according to his initial plans. Zilberman’s legacy still awaits its true discovery and this book is a second installment to it after The Birth of Meaning in Hindu Thought (Kluwer, 1988). Zilberman’s treatment of analogy is unique in its approach, scope, and universality for Western philosophical thought.
