Imagine that someone recovers relatively quickly, say, within two or three months, from grief over the death of her spouse, whom she loved and who loved her; and suppose that, after some brief interval, she remarries. Does the fact that she feels better and moves on relatively quickly somehow diminish the quality of her earlier relationship? Does it constitute a failure to do well by the person who died? Our aim is to respond to two arguments that give affirmative answers (...) to these questions. The first argument, which is developed by Dan Moller in “Love and Death”, states that recovering relatively quickly from grief over the deaths of people who are close to us is deeply regrettable, in one respect, because it means that these people were relatively unimportant to us. The second, which derives from some classic literary discussions of grief, states that such a recovery is regrettable because it amounts to abandoning the person who died. Responding to these arguments promises to dissolve certain anxieties about whether we do well by the people we love when they die. Beyond this, it promises to help us better understand what it means to cultivate good relationships with these people during their lives. (shrink)

"On the June 16th, 1996, Richard Sylvan died of a sudden and unexpected heart attack. His death, at the relatively young age of 60, robbed Australasia of one of its greatest philosophers, arguably the most original that it has ever produced. Richard was born Francis Richard Routley at Levin, New Zealand, on 13 December, 1935. He changed his name to Sylvan -- much to the confusion of a number of people -- when he remarried in 1983. After studying (...) at the Victoria University of Wellington, he took a job at the University of Sydney, in Australia, where he lived for the rest of his life. He had several other jobs in Australia, including one at the University of New.. (shrink)

This article focuses the divorce oaths reflected in fatwās from Ottoman social life, oathbreakings and the remedies muftīs suggested to nullify divorce oaths. The purpose of the article is to describe the usage areas of the divorce oath in Ottoman social life, the problems within and outside of marriage it created, and the ways to solve these problems, based on the issues consulted to muftīs. The fatwās used as a data source in the article are limited to those have personally (...) been asked to Hanafī muftīs who served in Anatolia and Rumelia between the 16th and 18th centuries. The article is a study of the history of law that uses the fatwās in the collections, most of which are found as manuscripts, as the main data source. The acceptance of conditional divorce as a kind of oath in the Hanafī legal tradition paved the way for its use in Ottoman social life for different purposes beyond divorce. A great number of fatwās indicate that the divorce oath of husband in the family was sometimes a means of restraining and educating the wife, and sometimes a counter measure some rules of the Hanafī madhhab that may cause victimization of the wife. In social life, the divorce oath was used to reinforce personal decisions, it often functioned as a verbal guarantee in debt relations, and allowed the authorities to put pressure on people. Violation of the divorce oaths would in many cases cause serious family problems. Therefore Ottoman muftīs suggested some remedies to nullify divorce oaths. These remedies generally are proxy, marriage by unauthorized person and to divorce the wife-to break the oath-to remarry the wife. The article describes and interprets numerous fatwās on which these findings are based, in the light of Hanafī legal doctrine. (shrink)

We present a cross-cultural analysis showing that the presence of an active or moral High God in societies varies generally along a continuum from lesser to greater technological complexity and subsistence productivity. Foragers are least likely to have High Gods. Horticulturalists and agriculturalists are more likely. Pastoralists are most likely, though they are less easily positioned along the productivity continuum. We suggest that belief in moral High Gods was fostered by emerging leaders in societies dependent on resources that were difficult (...) to manage and defend without group cooperation. These leaders used the concept of a supernatural moral enforcer to manipulate others into cooperating, which resulted in greater productivity. Reproductive success would accrue most to such leaders, but the average reproductive success of all individuals in the society would also increase with greater productivity. Supernatural enforcement of moral codes maintained social cohesion and allowed for further population growth, giving one society an advantage in competition with others. (shrink)

Southeast Asia has numerous religions and diverse forms of state-governance, so the populations largely have the freedom to express themselves within the context of their society. Expressing oneself can occur within the context of their religion, using the language they have been cultured within, if they remain in their cultural-context. This paper explores the context of Buddhist nations using militarized-language, seen as problematic by Dr. Matthew Kosuta, who professes in his masters-thesis that it is a contradiction. A portion of my (...) article refutes his position, on the grounds that Buddhism developed within the Hindu-Brahmanism context and caste was normalized in regions influenced by such culture. Equally, it could be noted, the Buddha also used a language that was suitable for agriculturalists, merchants, Brahmins, so a militarized-language was just one way to speak to some people within their own social context, which was understandable not just to them, but to anyone interested in attaining Nibbāna. (shrink)

Classical realist thought provides a diagnosis of the significance nuclear weapons that calls into question the very possibility of politics in the nuclear age. While sharing similarities with this...

William Hasker thinks that his emergent dualism provides a plausible account of the mind’s survival of bodily death, giving it a crucial advantage over physicalism. I do not share this appraisal. Emergentism by its very nature works against the (immediate) survival of death. The analogies that Hasker employs to overcome this initial implausibility fail due to factual errors, and his position ends up in no less a difficult position than the physicalism that Hasker rejects. Hasker’s attempt to escape this difficulty (...) results in what is effectively an abandonment of emergentism, and the adoption of a more traditional dualism. (shrink)

Recent studies of the evolution of religion have revealed the cognitive underpinnings of belief in supernatural agents, the role of ritual in promoting cooperation, and the contribution of morally punishing high gods to the growth and stabilization of human society. The universality of religion across human society points to a deep evolutionary past. However, specific traits of nascent religiosity, and the sequence in which they emerged, have remained unknown. Here we reconstruct the evolution of religious beliefs and behaviors in early (...) modern humans using a global sample of hunter-gatherers and seven traits describing hunter-gatherer religiosity: animism, belief in an afterlife, shamanism, ancestor worship, high gods, and worship of ancestors or high gods who are active in human affairs. We reconstruct ancestral character states using a time-calibrated supertree based on published phylogenetic trees and linguistic classification and then test for correlated evolution between the characters and for the direction of cultural change. Results indicate that the oldest trait of religion, present in the most recent common ancestor of present-day hunter-gatherers, was animism, in agreement with long-standing beliefs about the fundamental role of this trait. Belief in an afterlife emerged, followed by shamanism and ancestor worship. Ancestor spirits or high gods who are active in human affairs were absent in early humans, suggesting a deep history for the egalitarian nature of hunter-gatherer societies. There is a significant positive relationship between most characters investigated, but the trait “high gods” stands apart, suggesting that belief in a single creator deity can emerge in a society regardless of other aspects of its religion. (shrink)

In the discussion of global ethics, philosophical ethics risks losing its distinct theoretical horizons. This predicament arises primarily from philosophy's failure to anchor its own object and to provide a rational basis for global justice from within its current confined theoretical paradigm. Against this background, this paper will first prioritize global co-existence as the primary concern of global ethics, then propose ontological co-existence justice as its foundational principle, and finally argue that the normative validity of co-existence justice is predicated on (...) the nations fulfilling the critical requirements of modern civilization, namely, the advancement of individual freedom. (shrink)

It is my contention that what is generally construed as the Euthyphro Dilemma as a reason to deny that moral facts are based on theological facts is one of the worst arguments proposed in philosophy of religion or ethical theory, and that Socrates, the character of the dialogue who poses the dilemma, was both morally bankrupt in his challenge to Euthyphro, but more importantly here, ought to have lost the argument hands down. But in any dialogue, the author controls what (...) people say. Plato was able to easily give Socrates the victory by writing the ending of the story himself, where Euthyphro, believing that piety is what the gods approve of, loses the argument abysmally. The version of events presented here is different. This time, Euthyphro is permitted to offer a reasonable defence of his position, and he has the benefit of having been able to read all that has been said on the Euthyphro dilemma over the last couple of millennia, and especially the last fifty years. Under such circumstances, Socrates does not stand a chance. We arrive at our scene, the steps of the Dunedin High Court, in Dunedin, New Zealand, on a cool mid-winter July morning. (shrink)

According to the epistemological objection to divine command ethics, if morality is grounded in God’s commands, then those who do not believe in God cannot have moral knowledge. This objection has been raised—and answered before. However, the objection persists, and I argue here that it has not been substantially improved upon and does not deserve a second hearing. Whether or not God’s commands provide the basis of moral facts does not imply that unbelievers cannot have moral knowledge, since the ability (...) to know that something is true does not depend on our ability to know what makes it true. (shrink)

Conducting phenomenological research for dissertations can be an involved and challenging process, and writing it up is often the most challenging part. How to Write a Phenomenological Dissertation gives students practical, applied advice on how to structure and develop each chapter of the dissertation specifically for phenomenological research. Phenomenology is about personal experience and personal experience varies from researcher to researcher. However, this variation is a big source of confusion for new researchers in the social, behavioral, or health sciences. This (...) brief text is written in a simple, step-by-step fashion to account for this flexibility and variation while also providing structure necessary for a successful dissertation. Broken up into chapters that follow each chapter of the dissertation, this text logically addresses the various parts of phenomenological research, starting with ensuring phenomenology is the right method for your research, writing the literature review, going through methods and results sections to analysis and discussion. The author, using experience gleaned from supervising phenomenological dissertations for many years, gives time-tested advice on how structure the dissertation to fit into more common frameworks, using checklists and tables throughout. Each chapter includes a list of helpful resources for students to use alongside this book with specific information on methods and research. Unique to this text is a chapter on creating your own phenomenological method which allows students to expand their viewpoints and experiment in future studies after the dissertation. (shrink)

Using the Socratic Method in Counseling shows counselors how to use the Socratic method to help clients solve life problems using knowledge they may not realize they have. Coauthored by two experts from the fields of philosophy and counseling, the book presents theory and techniques that give counselors a client-centered and contextually bound method for better addressing issues of ethnicities, genders, cultures. Readers will find that Using the Socratic Method in Counseling is a thorough and useful text on a new (...) theoretical orientation grounded in ancient philosophy. (shrink)

When a liberal-democratic state signs a treaty or wages a war, does its whole polity do those things? In this article, we approach this question via the recent social ontological literature on collective agency. We provide arguments that it does and that it does not. The arguments are presented via three considerations: the polity's control over what the state does; the polity's unity; and the influence of individual polity members. We suggest that the answer to our question differs for different (...) liberal-democratic states and depends on two underlying considerations: the amount of discretion held by the state's officeholders; the extent to which the democratic procedure is deliberative rather than aggregative. (shrink)

This paper examines people's reasoning about identity continuity and its relation to previous research on how people value one-of-a-kind artifacts, such as artwork. We propose that judgments about the continuity of artworks are related to judgments about the continuity of individual persons because art objects are seen as physical extensions of their creators. We report a reanalysis of previous data and the results of two new empirical studies that test this hypothesis. The first study demonstrates that the mere (...) categorization of an object as “art” versus “a tool” changes people's intuitions about the persistence of those objects over time. In a second study, we examine some conditions that may lead artworks to be thought of as different from other artifacts. These observations inform both current understanding of what makes some objects one-of-a-kind as well as broader questions regarding how people intuitively think about the persistence of human agents. (shrink)

This paper sketches the antilogism of Christine Ladd-Franklin and historical advancement about antilogism, mainly constructs an axiomatic system Atl based on first-order logic with equality and the wholly-exclusion and not-wholly-exclusion relations abstracted from the algebra of Ladd-Franklin, with soundness and completeness of Atl proved, providing a simple and convenient tool on syllogistic reasoning. Atl depicts the empty class and the whole class differently from normal set theories, e.g. ZFC, revealing another perspective on sets and set theories. Two series of Dotterer (...) and the theorem proved by Russinoff are re-characterized in antilogistic formulas corresponding to the square of opposition and twenty-four moods of syllogism. Then the restricted equivalence between two forms of antilogism and minimal inconsistency is built up, implying the internal connection between antilogisms and minimal inconsistency and leaving two related conjectures not proved. Besides, this paper provides a new explanation for the reason why contrariety, subcontrariety, and subalternation and the nine special moods require the non-empty assumption. (shrink)

Rare copy number variants have a prominent role in the aetiology of schizophrenia and other neuropsychiatric disorders. Substantial risk for schizophrenia is conferred by large CNVs at several loci, including microdeletions at 1q21.1, 3q29, 15q13.3 and 22q11.2 and microduplication at 16p11.2. However, these CNVs collectively account for a small fraction of cases, and the relevant genes and neurobiological mechanisms are not well understood. Here we performed a large two-stage genome-wide scan of rare CNVs and report the significant association of copy (...) number gains at chromosome 7q36.3 with schizophrenia. Microduplications with variable breakpoints occurred within a 362-kilobase region and were detected in 29 of 8,290 patients versus 2 of 7,431 controls in the combined sample. All duplications overlapped or were located within 89 kilobases upstream of the vasoactive intestinal peptide receptor gene VIPR2. VIPR2 transcription and cyclic-AMP signalling were significantly increased in cultured lymphocytes from patients with microduplications of 7q36.3. These findings implicate altered vasoactive intestinal peptide signalling in the pathogenesis of schizophrenia and indicate the VPAC2 receptor as a potential target for the development of new antipsychotic drugs. © 2011 Macmillan Publishers Limited. All rights reserved. (shrink)

In order to maximize human performance, defence forces continue to explore, develop, and apply human performance enhancement (HPE) methods, ranging from pharmaceuticals to (bio)technological enhancement. This raises ethical, legal, and societal concerns and requires organizing a careful reflection and deliberation process, with relevant stakeholders. We discuss a range of ethical, legal, and societal aspects (ELSA), which people involved in the development and deployment of HPE can use for such reflection and deliberation. A realistic military scenario with proposed HPE application (...) can serve as a starting point for such an iterative and participatory process. Stakeholders can discuss this application, modify its features, and design appropriate processes around it – for instance, procedures for informed consent. We propose that organizing aspects into these three categories – ethical, legal, and societal – can help involve appropriate interlocutors at different moments: legal aspects with people in strategy or management roles, from the start of a project; ethical aspects with people in operations and medical roles, during development; and societal aspects with people in communication and personnel roles, during deployment. Notably, we developed and discussed this framework and the three aspects in close collaboration with personnel from the military. (shrink)

Happy people often fail to elaborate on persuasive arguments, while people in sad moods tend to scrutinise messages in greater detail. According to some motivational accounts, however, happy people will elaborate a message if they believe it might maintain their positive mood. The present research extends this reasoning by demonstrating that happy people will elaborate arguments from message presenters that convey positive hedonic attributes (i.e., source likeability). In a pilot study, we show that happy people (...) believe persuasive messages from a likeable source will be mood maintaining. The results of Study 1 demonstrate that these expectancies have important message-processing implications. In Study 1, sad participants elaborated arguments from both likeable and dislikeable sources, while happy participants only elaborated arguments from a likeable source. Consistent with motivational explanation of these effects, in Study 2, happy participants elaborated arguments from a likeable source when not distracted, but used likeability as a heuristic when distracted with a cognitive-load manipulation. Implications of these results for understanding the effects of mood on processing strategy, limitations, and directions for future research are discussed. (shrink)

Group assortative biases are stronger in regions where pathogen stress has been historically prevalent. Pushing the logic of this approach, extensions should include investigations of how cultural norms related to prosociality and relational striving may also covary with regional pathogen stress. Likewise, the pan-specific observation that diseased animals show decreased motor activity to facilitate recovery suggests that norms relevant to sickness behaviors may also vary as a function of regional parasite stress.

When two people try to communicate there is inevitably a confrontation: a representation against a representation, subconscious against subconscious. As this confrontation is subconscious, it often degenerates into conflict. A new model of civilization is necessary, the keystone is dialogue between human beings, nations, cultures and religions for the survival of humanity. In forming a new model of civilization a methodology of transdisciplinarity can be helpful. In 1985 I proposed the inclusion in the word “trans-disciplinarity,” introduced by Jean Piaget (...) in 1972, the meaning “beyond disciplines,” and I developed this idea over the years. Interdisciplinarity has a different goal than multidisciplinarity. The latter concerns a transfer of methods from one discipline to another, whereas the former overflows disciplines, but its goal still remains within the framework of disciplinary research. Interdisciplinarity has even the capacity of generating new disciplines. (shrink)

Genetic engineering promises to change the human condition by changing certain human characteristics. Why not take control of such changes and secure positive outcomes, making use of our progressing knowledge about human genetic make-up and our increasingly sophisticated skills? This paper elaborates the meanings of the word “change,” a cornerstone of the enhancement debate, focusing not on technicalities of genetic engineering but on philosophical implications of its implementation. The paper then turns to some of the complexities and difficulties of the (...) debate. Finally, it takes up a strictly philosophical investigation of what we mean by “change” as far as a basic structure of the human being (the human person) is concerned, and examines what conclusions can be drawn for genetic enhancement. National Catholic Bioethics Quarterly 10.4 (Winter 2010): 723–740. (shrink)

This essay offers a brief overview of Mihajlo Mihajlov's efforts in the USA to publicize human rights violations in Titoist Yugoslavia, Mihajlov co-founded the Committee to Aid Democratic Dissidents in Yugoslavia (CADDY) within The Democracy Intemational in 1979, Its CADDY Bulletin became a reliable source of information regarding persecutions and prosecutions of individuals and groups championing basic human rights and freedoms, the rule of law, pluralism, tolerance, and an open society in Yugoslavia, CADDY thus became a platform urging the democratization (...) of the country as the only way to avoid inter-ethnic conflagration. CADDY inspired Freedom House conferences and publications by both Freedom House and the Helsinki Committee USA as well as the most comprehensive multi-author volume on Human Rights in Yugoslavia, CADDY challenged not only one-party rule in Titoist Yugoslavia, but also the US, State Department's favorable view of this maverick communist state as the first to break away from the Soviet monolith. (shrink)

The implications of the causal and ubiquitous use, by doctors health-workers and politicians, of the word 'patient' are here discussed. Given that the many implications of this noun do not include health or normality (rather the contrary), it is questionable who, if anyone, profits from its indiscriminate use--and its use, even, at all.