Charles McCrary, Sincerely Held: American Secularism and Its Believers

Yours sincerely

Charles Parsons Mathematical Thought and Its Objects

This is the second, revised, version of a section-by-section discussion of Charles Parsons’s eagerly awaited Mathematical Thought and Its Objects (CUP, 2008: pp. xx + 378)1 – though not every section gets the same level of attention. For convenience, the divisions here correspond to the chapter/section divisions of the book. Parsons himself says that his book has been a very long time in the wr...

Do Voters Vote Sincerely?∗

In this paper we address the following questions: (i) To what extent is the hypothesis that voters vote sincerely testable or falsifiable? And (ii) in environments where the hypothesis is falsifiable, to what extent is the observed behavior of voters consistent with sincere voting? We show that using data only on how individuals vote in a single election, the hypothesis that voters vote sincere...

The Circulation of Secularism

Inquiring into the causes behind the spread of secularism in the modern world, this paper proposes that the concept has proliferated owing to its peculiar property as culture: It is simultaneously a piece of culture and also a reflection upon culture. In its latter capacity, it imagines a world in which alternative religious belief systems divide people. It spreads as a piece of culture because...

Diffraction for Non-believers *

Diffractive reactions involving a hard scale can be understood in terms of quarks and gluons. These reactions have become a valuable tool for investigating the low-x structure of the proton and the behavior of QCD in the high-density regime, and they may provide a clean environment to study or even discover the Higgs boson at the LHC. In this paper we give a brief introduction to the descriptio...