Let us call the Dependency Theses (DT) the view, first stated by Kant, that certain versions of the cosmological argument depend on the ontological argument. At least two different reasons have been given for the supposed dependence. Given the DT, some of Aquinas' views about God's essence, and about our knowledge of God's existence, can seem, at least at first, to be inconsistent. I consider two different ways of defending Aquinas against this suspicion of inconsistency. On the first defence, based on a widespread understanding of his notion of ‘necessary being’, Aquinas' views fall outside the scope of the DT. The success of this defence is doubtful. There is, however, another defence to be found in Aquinas' work, one directed not to avoiding, but actually to rejecting, the DT. In this second defence, the DT is not a correct assessment even of those views that do fall within its scope. Its success means that Aquinas had available a principled refutation of the DT some five hundred years before it was first formulated.

As a first step toward a general speech recognition computer program, a program has been developed to recognize ten Eng.ish vowels in isolated words of the form /b/—bowel—/t/. Input to the computer was real time spectral data obtained through the input system described at these meetings in May, 1958, by Forgie and Hughes. The program was developed from the study of spectral data from five speakers. The program was tried on new speakers, the errors analyzed, and the program modified. The program, as finally evolved by this process, first determines the rough location of the first two formants. The remaining confusions are resolved by combinations of the following, as required: (1) position of F3, (2) the slopes of F1 and F2, (3) an estimate of pitch, and (4) the energy in the frequency band between F1 and F2. Whenever the over-all power is above an arbitrary threshold, each 6-msec scan of the filtered data is classified as one of the ten possible vowels. A tally at the end of the word determines the final decision. The over-all recognition score for 21 subjects (11 male and 10 female) is 89%. Modifications of the program took place on the first 16 subjects only. The score for the last five speakers was 82%. (Lincoln Laboratory is operated by Massachusetts Institute of Technology with joint support of U. S. Army, Navy, and Air Force.)

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