Both Stanley Milgram and Ernest Becker studied and theorized human evil and offered explanations for evil acts, such as those constituting the Holocaust. Yet the explanations offered by Becker and Milgram are strikingly different. In this essay, brief biographical records of their lives are provided. Differences in their research methods and theories are then examined and traced to relevant dif...

THE IDEA of possible worlds has both promised and, I believe, delivered understanding and insight in a wide range of topics. Pre-eminent here, I think, is the topic of broadly logical possibility, both de &to and de re. But there are others: the nature of propositions, properties, and sets; the function of proper names and definite descriptions; the nature of counterfactuals; time and temporal ...

Evil is a concept that has fascinated and puzzled humankind for centuries. We confront evil on large scales, such as the Holocaust, on smaller scales, such as serial killers, and in day-to-day interactions that involve discrimination against or exploitation of others. During moments of reflection, we may even acknowledge the capacity for evil within ourselves. We are exposed daily to evil inten...

In most children and adults, primary infection with herpes simplex virus 1 (HSV-1) is asymptomatic. However, very rarely (incidence of 1 in 1,000,000), it can cause herpes simplex encephalitis (HSE). HSE also occurs in infants but with a much starker incidence of one in three. This age difference in susceptibility to HSV-1-caused HSE is not well understood. In a recent article in mBio, authors ...

Miracles and the problem of evil are two prominent areas of research within philosophy of religion. On occasion these areas converge, with God’s goodness being brought into question by the claim that either there is a lack of miracles, or there are immoral miracles. In this paper I shall highlight a second manner in which miracles and the problem of evil relate. Namely, I shall give reason as t...

For example, all the Fermat primes are evil while all the Mersenne primes > 3 are odious. Using direct calculations up to 10 we noticed that among the primes not exceeding n the evil primes are never in majority except for the cases n = 5 and n = 6. Moreover, in the considered limits the excess of the odious primes is not monotone but increases on the whole with records on primes 2, 13, 41, 67,...