The purpose of this thesis is to demonstrate that metaphysics is a necessary discipline – necessary in the sense that all areas of philosophy, all areas of science, and in fact any type of rational activity at all would be impossible without a metaphysical background or metaphysical presuppositions. Because of the extremely strong nature of this claim, it is not possible to put forward a very s...

The advent of the Internet has made the transfer of data between people easier and more efficient. One specific and popular application of this process is the peer-to-peer(P2P) network. P2P networks are an overlay network on top of the Internet’s topology and accounts for a large portion of Internet traffic[24]. The basic idea of a P2P network is that individual peers can connect to a set of ot...

The above dictionary characterization of alethic modalities states the central notions of alethic modal logic: necessity, and other notions that are usually thought of as being definable in terms of necessity and Boolean negation: impossibility, contingency, and possibility. The syntax of modal propositional logic is inductively defined over a denumerable set of sentence letters p0, p1, p2, . ....

In his article “On the Necessity of Bodily Awareness for Bodily Action” in this volume of Psyche Hong Yu Wong challenges the claim that bodily awareness is a necessary precondition for being able to voluntarily act with one’s body parts (the necessity thesis). Wong discusses empirical findings from studies of (i) deafferented patients, (ii) brain-computer interfaces and (iii) the automaticity o...

The overwhelming majority of primary lung malignancies are secondary to smoke inhalation and occur in the older adult population in the presence of symptoms that are usually suspicious for an underlying malignancy. A chest radiograph is the initial imaging modality of choice to diagnose a lung cancer. However, a small percentage of lung cancer occurs despite a lack of smoking history whatsoever...

Necessity abounds. There are the necessary truths of logic, mathematics and metaphysics, the necessary connections among events in the natural world, the necessary or unconditional principles of ethics, and many other forms of necessary truth or connection. But how much diversity is there to this abundance? Are all necessary truths and connections reducible to a single common form of necessity?...

Peer-to-Peer (P2P) networks have grown to such a massive scale that performing an efficient search in the network is non-trivial. Systems such as Gnutella [1] were initially plagued with scalability problems as the number of users grew into the tens of thousands. As the number of users has now climbed into the millions, system designers have resorted to the use of supernodes to address scalabil...

Throughout human history, cognition enhancement has not only been a constant, but also imperative for our species evolution and well-being. However, philosophical assumptions that enhancing by biomedical means goes against some immutable nature, combined with the lack of conclusive data about its use on healthy individuals long-term effects, can sometimes result in prohibitive approaches. In th...