The Problem Of The Many

When many people are involved in an activity, it is often difficult, if not impossible, to pinpoint who is morally responsible for what, a phenomenon known as the ‘problem of many hands.’ This term is increasingly used to describe problems with attributing individual responsibility in collective settings in such diverse areas as public administration, corporate management, law and regulation, technological development and innovation, healthcare, and finance. This volume provides an in-depth philosophical analysis of this problem, examining the notion of moral responsibility and distinguishing between different normative meanings of responsibility, both backward-looking (accountability, blameworthiness, and liability) and forward-looking (obligation, virtue). Drawing on the relevant philosophical literature, the authors develop a coherent conceptualization of the problem of many hands, taking into account the relationship, and possible tension, between individual and collective responsibility. This systematic inquiry into the problem of many hands pertains to discussions about moral responsibility in a variety of applied settings.

'The best collection I've read in ages: every poem contains something unexpected and unexpectedly powerful. This is serious, modern, ambitious and bold work – the kind of poetry you hope to find, and rarely do' – Nick Laird John Ashbery called Timothy Donnelly’s previous collection, The Cloud Corporation, ‘The poetry of the future, here today’. The Problem of the Many sees Donnelly, one of the most influential poets of his generation, focused less on the future than the end of history: these richly textured and intellectually capacious poems often seem to attempt nothing less than a circumscription of the totality of human experience. The book contains the already widely praised ‘Hymn to Life’, which opens with a litany of what we have made extinct; elsewhere, from an immediately contemporary vantage, Donnelly confronts the clutter and devastation that civilization has left us as he strives towards a beauty that we still need, along the way enlisting agents as various as Prometheus, Jonah, Flamin’ Hot Cheetos, NyQuil, Nietzsche, and Alexander the Great. The Problem of the Many refers to the famous philosophical problem of what defines the larger aggregate – a cloud, a crowd – which Donnelly extends to address the subject of individual boundary, identity and belonging. Donnelly’s solutions may be wholly poetic, but he has succeeded in speaking as deeply to these profound and urgent issues as any writer currently at work.

Argues for a more robust conception of responsibility in public life than prevails in contemporary democracies.

Single-volume account of methods used in dealing with the many-body problem and the resulting physics. Single-particle approximations, second quantization, many-body perturbation theory, Fermi fluids, superconductivity, many-boson systems, more. Each chapter contains well-chosen problems. Only prerequisite is basic understanding of elementary quantum mechanics. 1967 edition.

This book differs from its predecessor, Lieb & Mattis Mathematical Physics in One Dimension, in a number of important ways. Classic discoveries which once had to be omitted owing to lack of space ? such as the seminal paper by Fermi, Pasta and Ulam on lack of ergodicity of the linear chain, or Bethe's original paper on the Bethe ansatz ? can now be incorporated. Many applications which did not even exist in 1966 (some of which were originally spawned by the publication of Lieb & Mattis) are newly included. Among these, this new book contains critical surveys of a number of important developments: the exact solution of the Hubbard model, the concept of spinons, the Haldane gap in magnetic spin-one chains, bosonization and fermionization, solitions and the approach to thermodynamic equilibrium, quantum statistical mechanics, localization of normal modes and eigenstates in disordered chains, and a number of other contemporary concerns.

Studies in Epistemology was first published in 1980. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions. This is Volume V in the series Midwest Studies in Philosophy In 1979 the University of Minnesota Press assumed publication of the annual Midwest Studies in Philosophy, previously published by the University of Minnesota, Morris. At that time, the young series had already received acclaim from philosophers. Alan Donagan called the Studies "a significant and up-to-date forum of discussion on topics that matter to all serious philosophers," and, according to W. V. Quine, the Studies have maintained "an unusually high standard."

Study Edition

This important collection brings together both established figures and new researchers to offer fresh perspectives on the ever-controversial subject of the history of witchcraft. Using Keith Thomas's Religion and the Decline of Magic as a starting point, the contributors explore the changes of the last twenty-five years in the understanding of early modern witchcraft, and suggest new approaches, especially concerning the cultural dimensions of the subject. Witchcraft cases must be understood as power struggles, over gender and ideology as well as social relationships, with a crucial role played by alternative representations. Witchcraft was always a contested idea, never fully established in early modern culture but much harder to dislodge than has usually been assumed. The essays are European in scope, with examples from Germany, France, and the Spanish expansion into the New World, as well as a strong core of English material.

Of all Plato’s dialogues, the Parmenides is notoriously the most difficult to interpret. Scholars of all periods have disagreed about its aims and subject matter. The interpretations have ranged from reading the dialogue as an introduction to the whole of Platonic metaphysics to seeing it as a collection of sophisticated tricks, or even as an elaborate joke. This work presents an illuminating new translation of the dialogue together with an extensive introduction and running commentary, giving a unified explanation of the Parmenides and integrating it firmly within the context of Plato's metaphysics and methodology. Scolnicov shows that in the Parmenides Plato addresses the most serious challenge to his own philosophy: the monism of Parmenides and the Eleatics. In addition to providing a serious rebuttal to Parmenides, Plato here re-formulates his own theory of forms and participation, arguments that are central to the whole of Platonic thought, and provides these concepts with a rigorous logical and philosophical foundation. In Scolnicov's analysis, the Parmenides emerges as an extension of ideas from Plato's middle dialogues and as an opening to the later dialogues. Scolnicov’s analysis is crisp and lucid, offering a persuasive approach to a complicated dialogue. This translation follows the Greek closely, and the commentary affords the Greekless reader a clear understanding of how Scolnicov’s interpretation emerges from the text. This volume will provide a valuable introduction and framework for understanding a dialogue that continues to generate lively discussion today.

Superb introduction for nonspecialists covers Feynman diagrams, quasi particles, Fermi systems at finite temperature, superconductivity, vacuum amplitude, Dyson's equation, ladder approximation, and more. "A great delight." — Physics Today. 1974 edition.