Scaling Arguments
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This course explores main answers to the question "when do governments deserve our allegiance?" It starts with a survey of major political theories of the Enlightenment—Utilitarianism, Marxism, and the social contract tradition—through classical formulations, historical context, and contemporary debates relating to politics today. It then turns to the rejection of Enlightenment political thinking. Lastly, it deals with the nature of, and...more
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Introduction to the Kawa Development Environment: Evaluation of Expressions
Stanford / Computer Science
Introduction to the Kawa Development Environment: Evaluation of Expressions, Loading Function Definitions From a .Scm File, Mapping Arbitrary Unary Functions Over Lists in Scheme Using the Map Operation, Mapping List Functions (Car, Cdr) Over Lists of Lists, Using Mapping Functions with More than One Input by Passing Multiple Lists into Map, Implementing the Unary Version of Map Using Recursion, Apply, Which Allows You to Specify a...more
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Car-Cdr Recursion Problem that Returns the Sum of Every Element in a List of Integers, How Scheme Checks Type During Run-Time Rather than Compilation, Recursive Implementation of the Fibonacci Function in Scheme, Example that Illustrates Runtime Error/Type Checking Vs. Compile-Time Error/Type Checking, Writing a Recursive Flatten Function that Removes All the Intervening Parentheses from a List, Using a Cond Structure to Branch Over the...more
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Generic Lsearch - Prototype, Comparison Function, Implementation, Casting Void*S to Char*S to Compute Byte Offsets, Client Use of Generic Lsearch, Example of a Comparison Function for Integers, More Complicated Data Types and Lsearch- Example Using C-Strings, Comparison Function for Two C-Strings, With Arguments that Represent Char**S, Comparison Functions Where the Key is a Different Type than the Second Argument, Using a Pointer to a...more
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Over time, economists' justifications for why free markets are a good thing have changed. In the first few classes, we saw how under some conditions, the competitive allocation maximizes the sum of agents' utilities. When it was found that this property didn't hold generally, the idea of Pareto efficiency was developed. This class reviews two proofs that equilibrium is Pareto efficient, looking at the arguments of economists Edgeworth and...more
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The debate between contagionists and anticontagionists over the transmission of infectious diseases played a major role in nineteenth-century medical discourse. On the one side were those who believed that diseases could be spread by infected material, perhaps including people and inanimate objects, and on the other those who subscribed to the more venerable miasmatic theory. Although the contagionist view would be substantially...more
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The lecture begins with a continued discussion of the Cartesian argument and its weaknesses. The lecture then turns to Plato's metaphysical views in the context of his work, Phaedo. The key point in the discussion is the idea that in addition to the ordinary empirical world that we are familiar with, we posit the existence of a second realm in which the Platonic forms exist. These forms are the abstract properties that we attribute to...more
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Part 1 - Free to Choose: With humorous references to Bill Gates and Michael Jordan, Sandel introduces the libertarian notion that redistributive taxation—taxing the rich to give to the poor—is akin to forced labor. PART 2 - Who Owns Me?: Students first discuss the arguments behind redistributive taxation. If you live in a society that has a system of progressive taxation, aren’t you obligated to pay your taxes? Don’t many rich people...more
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There is a longstanding debate over the origins of syphilis, in which arguments over how the disease arrived in Europe have historically been linked to racist and xenophobic ideologies as well as to scientific and historical research. Whatever its provenance, the major syphilis epidemic of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries spread in the train of war, alongside Charles VIII of France's armies. Syphilis was distinguished...more
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Professor Kagan discusses in detail the argument of free will as proof for the existence of an immaterial soul. The argument consists of three premises: 1) We have free will. 2) Nothing subject to determinism has free will. 3) All purely physical systems are subject to determinism. The conclusion drawn from this is that humans are not a purely physical system; but Professor Kagan explains why this argument is not truly compelling. In...more
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This lecture introduces students to the study of psychology from an evolutionary perspective, the idea that like the body, natural selection has shaped the development of the human mind. Prominent arguments for and against the theory of natural selection and its relationship to human psychology are reviewed. Students will hear several examples of how studying mental phenomenon from an evolutionary perspective can help constrain theories...more
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Professor Kagan puts forward the claim that Tolstoy's character Ivan Ilych is quite the typical man in terms of his views on mortality. All of his life he has known that death is imminent but has never really believed it. When he suddenly falls ill and is about to die, the fact of his mortality shocks him. In trying to further access how people think about death, Professor Kagan explores the claim that "we all die alone," presents a...more
