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This book argues that pre-modern societies were characterized by a common quest for human flourishing or excellence, i.e. virtue. The history of virtue is a particularly fruitful approach when studying pre-modern periods. Systems of moral philosophy and more day-to-day moral ideas and practices in which virtue was central were incredibly important in pre-modern societies within and among diverse scholarly, literary, religious and social communities. Virtue was a cornerstone of pre-modern societies, permeating society in many different ways, and on many different levels, and it was conveyed in erudite and pedagogical texts, ritual, performance and images. The construction of virtues such as wisdom, courage, and justice helped shape identities and communities, but also served to legitimize and reinforce differences pertaining to gender, social hierarchies, and nations. On a more fundamental level, studying the history of virtue helps us understand the guiding principles of historical action. Thus, we believe that the history of virtue is central to understanding these societies, and that the history of virtue, including criticisms of virtue and virtue ethics, tells us important things about how men and women thought and acted in ages past.

This book introduces a method of research which can be used in various fields of mathematics. It examines, in a systematic way, the quantitative characterizations of the “deviation from a (given) property”, called the “defect of a property”, in: set theory; topology; measure theory; real, complex and functional analysis; algebra; geometry; number theory; fuzzy mathematics.Besides well-known “defects”, the book introduces and studies new ones, such as: measures of noncompactness for fuzzy sets; fuzzy and intuitionistic entropies; the defect of (sub, super)additivity; complementarity; monotonicity for set functions; the defect of convexity; monotonicity; differentiability for real functions; the defect of equality for inequalities; the defect of orthogonality for sets and defects of properties for linear operators in normed spaces; defects of properties (commutativity, associativity, etc.) for binary operations; defects of orthogonality and parallelness in Euclidean and non-Euclidean geometries; defects of integer, perfect, prime and amicable numbers; the defect of tautology in fuzzy logic.

The present volume covers the story of the history of CERN from the mid 1960s to the late 1970s. The book is organized in three main parts. The first, containing contributions by historians of science, perceives the laboratory as being at the node of a complex of interconnected relationships between scientists and science managers on the staff, the users in the member states, and the governments which were called upon to finance the organization. Parts II and III include chapters by practising scientists. The former surveys the theoretical and experimental physics results obtained at CERN in this period, while the latter describes the development of the laboratory's accelerator complex and Charpak detection techniques.