Five on Five

Five Answers on Pragmatism

Prof. Haack answers a series of questions on pragmatism, beginning with the origins of this tradition in the work of Peirce and James, its evolution in the work of Dewey and Mead, and its influence beyond the United States in, for example, the Italian pragmatists and the radical British pragmatist F. C. S. Schiller. Classical pragmatism, she observes, is a rich and varied tradition from which t...

Five Answers on Randomness

Five brief and highly biased answers to five questions on randomness posed by Hector Zenil: Why were you initially drawn to the study of computation and randomness? What have we learned? What don’t we know (yet)? What are the most important open problems? What are the prospects for progress? 1 Why were you initially drawn to the study of computation and randomness? The topic is so all-encompass...

Captopril: five years on.

Five Points on Columns

"Column," like "gene," has both conceptual and linguistic shortcomings. The simple question "what is a column" is not easy to answer and the word itself is not easy to replace. In the present article, I have selected five points, in no way comprehensive or canonical, but which may nevertheless serve as a prompt and aid for further discussions and re-evaluation. These are: that anatomical column...

Five Questions on Complexity

1. Why did you begin working with complex systems? I have been interested by all forms of complexity and self-organization since my childhood. I was always a keen observer of nature, being fascinated by complex phenomena such as ants walking apparently randomly across a branch, the cracks that would appear in drying mud, or the frost crystals that would form on grass during winter nights. As an...