The Greek Philosophers. A. W. Benn

The Philosophers ' Process

The Philosophers' Process is a Markovian version of the famous Dining Philosophers Problem introduced by Dijkstra as a model for resource sharing. It can be viewed as a reversible interacting particle system. This paper deals with the problem of computing its reversible measure in the case of a large but nite number of sites. This equilibrium measure is a Markov eld on the underlying graph of i...

Response to Doug Benn comments

Augustine and the Philosophers

Because of the immensity of Augustine’s corpus and the complex intellectual patrimony that informs it, attempts to place him within the history of philosophical traditions are often partial and in need of supplementation. In treating below of Augustine’s engagement with Aristotelianism, Middle Platonism, Neoplatonism, and Stoicism, I shall be drawing attention to particular topics, lexical poin...

The Driving Philosophers

We introduce a new synchronization problem in mobile ad-hoc systems: the Driving Philosophers. In this problem, an unbounded number of driving philosophers (processes) access a round-about (set of shared resources organized along a logical ring). The crux of the problem is to ensure, beside traditional mutual exclusion and starvation freedom at each particular resource, gridlock freedom (i.e., ...

Primates , philosophers and the biological basis of morality : a review of primates and philosophers by Frans

Philosophical inquiries into morality are as old as philosophy, but it may turn out that morality itself is much, much older than that. At least, that is the main thesis of primatologist Frans De Waal, who in this short book based on his Tanner Lectures at Princeton, elaborates on what biologists have been hinting at since Darwin’s (1871) book The Descent of Man and Hamilton’s (1963) studies on...