Manley and Wasserman (2008) join the chorus of opposition to the possibility of conditional analysis of dispositions. But that score cannot be settled without more careful attention to the implicit philosophical methodology. Some of the opposition to such an analysis badly overestimates the effect of counterexamples, as if the Gettier example were sufficient to refute the possibility of conjunc...

The naturalistic fallacy and Hume’s ‘law’ are frequently appealed to for the purpose of drawing limits around the scope of scientific inquiry into ethics and morality. These two objections are shown to be without force. Thus two highly influential obstacles are removed from naturalizing ethics. The relative merits of moral skepticism and moral realism are compared. Moral skepticism and some for...

The world has been urbanizing for centuries (United Nations 2001; United Nations Centre for Human Settlements [1996] 2000). While some scholars note a decline in the significance of space and distance as the result of telecommunications advancements and globalization (Cairncross 2001), other thinkers point to the continuing, if not increasing, importance of proximity and multiple benefits of ur...

Genetic Algorithms (GAs) are increasingly used for such purposes as deriving programs 1] and producing designs for robots 2]. According to the building-block hypothesis and schema analysis of Holland 3] the GA is an eecient search method. However, empirical work has shown that in some cases the method is outperformed by simpler processes such as random-permutation hill climbing 4] and 5]. The p...