PROFESSOR LIONEL BEALE ON MATERIALISM.

Lionel Shingleton Smith

Against Materialism

Materialism is the idea that human beings are material objects—brains, perhaps, or some part of the brain—without immaterial selves or souls. I give two arguments against materialism. The first is an argument from possibility: it is possible that I should exist when no part of my body exists, in which case I am not identical with my body or any part of my body. The second is an argument from im...

Aristotelian Materialism

I argue that a modern gloss on Aristotle’s notions of Form and Matter not only allows us to escape a dualism of the psychological and the physical, but also results in a plausible sort of materialism. This is because Aristotle held that the essential nature of any psychological state, including perception and human thought, is to be some physical property. I also show that Hilary Putnam and Mar...

Lionel Sharples Penrose (1898-1972).

Convergence Properties of Beale - Powell

The Beale-Powell restart algorithm is highly useful for large-scale unconstrained optimization. In this paper, we use an example to show that the algorithm may fail to converge. The global convergence of a slightly modiied algorithm is proved.