Yeovil College

After a brief history of the problem of the state and its political authority, I steer between individualism and collectivism by proposing an account of the state as a set of relations. The state is an institution represented by persons (its officers); but it was not instituted, it evolved. Morality demands a state with the rights and obligations to enforce persons’ obligations to each other, and to impose new obligations on persons to secure freedom. The only legitimate state is a liberal state. Jeremy Waldron’s defence of laws against “hate speech” is rejected. I criticise the views of Bishop Berkeley and of Jason Brennan while arguing that, barring specific agreements, persons have no obligations to obey the state insofar as it is illiberal. Persons have obligations to the state to pay fair taxes and to obey legitimate laws. Acknowledging that persons also have obligations to the state not to commit suicide or to become a permanent slave enables us to dispense with the dubious notion of a person’s obligations to herself. Other issues discussed are abortion, the treatment of animals and humans that are not persons, social welfare, equality, inheritance, and how my theory contrasts with moral theories of a consequentialist type.

In recent years, there has been a “value turn” in epistemology. We intuitively think of knowledge as having a value, a value that mere true belief does not have, and it has been held to be a condition of adequacy on theories of knowledge that they be able to explain why. Unfortunately, for most theories their explanations suffer from the “swamping problem” because what has to be added to turn true belief into knowledge has value only instrumentally to truth; for example, we take being justified to be valuable, but only because being justified is our way of trying to believe what is true and only what is true, and it follows from this that for a belief already granted as true, no extra value is added by the fact that it is justified as well. So, the task is to solve the value problem while avoiding the swamping problem. I will argue that, in fact, the value turn leaves epistemological theorizing much as it was. My reasoning goes briefly as follows: on the usual interpretation of the value problem, the demand it places on theories of knowledge is internally incoherent and hence implausible as a condition of their adequacy. It is a condition of adequacy nonetheless that the theory avoid the swamping problem if we really do have the intuition supposed. I will then use a thought-experiment to consider different kinds of knowledge and argue that, with the exception of a priori knowledge, there is no such intuition. With this exception, there is no swamping problem either, and hence theories cannot be ruled inadmissible on the grounds that the knowledge-making features they propose fail to have a non-instrumental value. My conclusion is that it is only whatever has to be added to true a priori belief in order to turn it into knowledge that has to have a non-instrumental value, that is to say, only a priori knowledge that has a value problem. But this problem is easily solved.

Electrospinning generates nanofibres at speeds that often surpass those of conventional man-made fibre production. This makes control and manipulation of these nanofibres that much more difficult and challenging. However, to take full advantage of the superior properties of electrospun nanofibres, their production process must be clearly understood and all possible means of fibre formation and hence fibre control explored. This article attempts to explain electrospun fibre production from first principles and uses schematics to follow the electrospinning process from inception, i.e. in the nozzle, to collection with respect to electrostatic behaviours. The complex interrelationship between the charged species in the moving solution and their subsequent polarization and the induced internal field by the applied external electric field are systematically explored and explained.

LEGAL ISSUES concerning essential nursing care are demystified in this useful book, which covers accountability, equality and human rights, consent to treatment, confidentiality, and the protection of vulnerable clients including children.

This book deals thoroughly with certain new and advanced topics in mathematical analysis, and is likely to interest engineers, mathematical physicists and other applied mathematicians. By examining the properties of certain mathematical entities, notably the Green's function. Professor Lanczos conducts a broad investigation into linear differential operators, taking as his central theme the identity of form and treatment between these operators and matrix algebra. 6 x 9, 582 pages, 58 diagrams, 3 tables, price 80s.