In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Buddhist-Christian Studies 22 (2002) 201-202 [Access article in PDF] Conference on Pure Land Buddhism in Dialogue with Christian Theology James Fredericks Loyola Marymount University As Charlie Parker devotees will attest, improvisation at its most thrilling, if not its most ingenious, is often the result of careful planning. Cannot something similar be said of interreligious dialogue? All our planning and study are best put to use when they suddenly (...) become mere prologue to an encounter that has forced us off the well-trodden path. A dialogue meeting at Loyola Marymount University, September 9-14, 2001, began with much planning and became highly improvisational on September 11th.The roots of this conference go back to discussions between Dennis Hirota and myself in Kyoto in 1998-1999. The two of us are interested in contributing to the future development of Shin Buddhism by placing it in dialogue with Christian theology. The focus here is on Christian theology as one aspect of Christianity's response to the modern world. We are both interested in investigating various theological methods as Christian responses to modernity, and the contributions these methods have made to the reform and renewal of Christian institutions. The ulterior purpose of these investigations is to think in new ways about how a Buddhist "theology" might contribute to the institutional reform and religious renewal of Shin Buddhism.A first dialogue meeting was held at Chikushi Jogakuen University (Dazaifu, Japan) in June of 2000. Participants included faculty from Chikushi Jogakuen, Charlie Hallisey (then of Harvard University), Peter McCormick (International Academy for Philosophy, Liechtenstein), and me (Loyola Marymount University). A second meeting was held at Loyola Marymount in September 2001. For one week, beginning September 6th, meetings were held at the Shin Buddhist temple and a neighboring Roman Catholic parish in the Little Tokyo district of Los Angeles, followed by an academic conference at Loyola Marymount starting on Monday, September 10th. These meetings brought together faculty from Chikushi Jogakuen and Loyola Marymount, Shin Buddhist specialists from the Eastern Buddhist Society in Tokyo, ministers from the Los Angeles Nishi and Higashi Honganji Temples, Charlie Hallisey (Wisconsin), and John Ross Carter (Colgate University). The visiting Buddhists had a chance to meet with the Buddhist-Catholic dialogue group in Los Angeles. Papers were presented on a number of subjects, including (1) Christian theology's [End Page 201] contribution to institutional reform and religious renewal in recent Roman Catholic history and its implications for Shin Buddhism in both the United States and Japan; (2) theological method and moral theology in relation to end of life issues from both a Shin and Christian perspective; (3) truth and history in interreligious understanding; (4) Shin Buddhism, Christianity and religious responses to social discrimination; and (5) Christian theology as a stimulus to the development of a Shin Buddhist theology.On the morning of September 11th, dialogue as formal academic presentations ended and dialogue as spontaneous improvisation began. With U.S. air transportation closed down by the federal government, prospects for return flights to Japan were indefinitely postponed. A planned outing to watch Ichiro Suzuki (of the Seattle Mariners) play the Angels had to be canceled (Anaheim stadium was also closed). Instead, Christians and Buddhists, Americans and Japanese suddenly were brought together in ways they could not have predicted and began to improvise. The campus ministry of Loyola Marymount organized an impromptu mass for the entire university on the evening of September 11th. The Buddhist visitors were given a place of honor at the liturgy and publicly welcomed as guests of the Catholic community. The psalm response for the mass was a musical setting of the words, "Shepherd me oh Lord, beyond my wants, beyond my fears, from death into life." In the days that followed, this text became the basis for very affecting conversations among the Buddhists and the Christians in response to the terrorist attacks. From the Shin perspective, Buddhists were able to bring a depth of meaning to these words even as they were interested in what the psalm might mean to Christians.Like improvisation in jazz, interreligious dialogue is sometimes at its... (shrink)

In relativistic classical and quantum mechanics with Poincaré-invariant parameter, particle worldlines are traced out by the evolution of spacetime events. The formulation of a covariant canonical framework for the evolving events leads to a dynamical theory in which mass conservation is demoted from a priori constraint to the status of conserved Noether current for a certain class of interactions. In pre-Maxwell electrodynamics—the local gauge theory associated with this framework —events induce five local off-shell fields, which mediate interactions between instantaneous events, (...) not between the worldlines which represent entire particle histories. The fifth field, required to compensate for dependence of gauge transformations on the evolution parameter, enables the exchange of mass between particles and fields. In the equilibrium limit, these pre-Maxwell fields are pushed onto the zero-mass shell, but during interactions there is no mechanism regulating the mass that photons may acquire, even when event trajectories evolve far into the spacelike region. This feature of the off-shell formalism requires the application of some ad hoc mechanism for controlling the photon mass in two opposite physical domains: the low energy motion of a charged event in classical Coulomb scattering, and the renormalization of off-shell quantum electrodynamics. In this paper, we discuss a nonlocal, higher derivative correction to the photon kinetic term, which provides regulation of the photon mass in a manner which preserves the gauge invariance and Poincaré covariance of the original theory. We demonstrate that the inclusion of this term is equivalent to an earlier solution to the classical Coulomb problem, and that the resulting quantum field theory is renormalized. (shrink)

Burnout syndrome and obesity are two growing conditions that affect employees’ health and company productivity. Recently, several studies have pointed to a possible relationship between both phenomena. However, such a relationship has not been clearly defined. This research analyzes the relationship between BS dimensions and body mass index, the latter being treated as a moderator variable among obese senior and middle managers in the Mexican maquiladora industry through a structural equation model. A total of 361 senior and middle managers completed (...) both the Maslach Burnout Inventory-General Survey [with emotional exhaustion, cynicism, and professional efficacy as subscale dimensions] and a sociodemographic questionnaire. The results showed a statistically significant relationship between EE and PE, with BMI acting as a moderator variable. The results showed that when BMI increases as a moderator variable, the strength of the relationship between EE and PE also changes. For example, although PE had a negative value of 0.14 before the moderator effect, the value increased up to 0.32 when the BMI was factored into the relationship. Therefore, maquiladora industries are being advised to increase their investments on the identification and prevention of employees’ EE and obesity. Such interventions would promote a better quality of life and could prevent economic losses resulting from poor employee performance. (shrink)

continent. 1.4 (2011): 279—285. Concerning its Transitive Nature, the Conversion of Native Americans of Spanish Colonial California, Indoctrinated Catholicism, & the Creation There’s no direct archaeological evidence that Jesus ever existed. 1 I memorized the Act of Contrition. I don’t remember it now, except the beginning: Forgive me Father for I have sinned . . . This was in preparation for the Sacrament of Holy Reconciliation, where in a confessional I confessed my sins to Father Scott, who looked like Jesus, (...) at least in Western cultural representations of Jesus since the middle ages, and if Jesus put on a few pounds. Father Scott was long-haired, redheaded, bearded, chubby, and tall. When he left church with the procession of altar servers and Eucharistic ministers, yelling, “Sing a Good Song Unto the Lord,” he smiled, hands folded, and he gazed over his parishioners, and bounced along. For four months every year he lived among the Crow Nation in Montana, where towards the end of his tenure at Our Lady of Refuge, they adopted him as an honorary member of their tribe. * This is the prayer we chanted, holding hands, every night before dinner: Bless us oh Lord, for these our gifts, which we are about to receive, our bounty through Christ, our Lord, Amen. Then we all said, God bless the cook! When we were with my grandparents, Grandpa said, God bless Chicky, and Holly, and Harvey, and Boots—all the dead dogs. * My sister tells me that she sits next to a handsome man on a flight across the country. After chitchat, she withdraws her book. She’s reading Kevin Sampsell’s A Common Pornography . After a few moments, the handsome man also reads from his book—his leather-bound Bible. Sister thinks, Oh, Jesus—too bad. She falls asleep. Later, settled in Nashville, she opens her volume and out falls a Jesus-covered card that reads, You can still find God and Salvation! Because that handsome God-fearing young man saw that word— pornography . * I suppose Father Jim’s dark hair, beard, and glasses made me think doctoral-ly of him. He called while I was in the midst of a breakup, after I’d twice attempted suicide, and my mother was desperate for help. She somehow found and phoned him. And Jim, now years out of Our Lady of Refuge’s parish, twenty years since my baptism, years even since he’d left the priesthood and the Catholic faith, still made the effort to bring me back into the fold. He said, “Have you seen a priest?” I did not respond, as I was more shocked to hear his voice than anything, so I said, “How are you, Father Jim? Sorry, I guess I shouldn’t call you ‘Father.’” And I said, “Why did you leave the priesthood? Do you have a girlfriend?” He said that I should call him just “Jim.” He said, “Do you need someone to talk to?” I said, “Not really.” He said, “Call your mother; she’s worried about you.” That was the last time I talked to Father Jim. * Mother let me know just how disappointed Jesus was. I cried and cried, and said I was sorry. Into my hands she placed my missal, ordered forty Rosaries. She said next Saturday I would go to confession. I hated confession. Who wouldn’t? * I realize, of course, that this page is a kind of confessional. * The Kumeyaay, Ipai, Tipai, Chumash, Esselen, Rumsen—all Native Americans of Alta California—shared similarities in their religions. Southern Californian tribes made use of Datura, or jimpson weed, a hallucinogen, for religious rituals. In the creation, God made brother sky and sister earth. Brother and sister mated, and sister gave birth to all things on Earth, including people, but it was difficult to distinguish people from all other aspects of Earth because everything was alive: granite and obsidian, the Pacific and its waves, the San Diego and Los Angeles Rivers. Wiyot—a hero—was very powerful, born from lightning, the son of the Creator and a virgin. When Wiyot thought that human women’s legs were more beautiful than Frog’s, Frog became jealous and poisoned Wiyot. The dying Wiyot went to all the people’s villages, and he distributed his power among them. He said, “When I die, I should be cremated.” The people built the fire and funeral pyre. When the fire was ready, and the people about to place Wiyot’s body upon it, Coyote came and snatched away Wiyot’s heart. * My friend Nick told me once how he ate some jimpson weed and that he hallucinated for three days. His family took a road trip and, while driving over the Sierra Nevada mountains, he kept seeing dinosaurs roaming the open meadows and charging down snowy slopes. So it’s no wonder that Native Americans who ingested this plant would have developed religion. * Walking Castroville’s streets after school I got into fights but mostly watched other boys scrabbling on the asphalt. I went to Burger King for Whoppers. Me and my friends cussed. Antonio admonished me when I said, “damn,” while strutting a sidewalk alongside the church. He said, “Jaime”—pronounced Hi-May, which was what all the Mexicans called me—“you’re crazy, eh. Don’t cuss at the church.” He meant while at church, as in, within its vicinity. I said, “We’re not in church.” Once we’d crossed the street, Tony said, “Damn dude, you’re fuckin crazy!” * Blessed Father Fray Junípero Serra raised the Eucharistic goblet to his lips, and candlelight danced on the blood’s tiny waves. Incense clouded the church so completely that some of the Pame natives grew nauseous. So, too, felt Blessed Father Fray Junípero Serra later that night, as he bent over a ceramic bowl and vomited blood, not only the Lord’s, but his own, for poison had laced the sacred vessel into which he poured the sacrament. The physician tending to the sick prelate urged him to take the remedy he’d prepared. But Blessed Father Fray Junípero Serra refused, said that he would pray, for he had never taken any medicine in his life, and he never would. * The Chumash of El Valle de Los Osos called themselves the Stishni, separating themselves from Chumash of other regions, those varying tribes of the central California coast that spoke mutually unintelligible dialects of their Hokan language. This made learning their languages impossible for the Spanish friars, to say nothing of translating the Doctrina. Thus the priests baptized few natives, despite the help that the tribes offered the fledgling settlements in the form of meat and acorn meal, which the Spaniards found repugnant. Some from these cultures, feeling threatened by the newcomers, shot flaming arrows into the thatched roofs of the mission structures. And why wouldn’t they feel threatened when priests chastised them for performing, for example, their Coyote Dance, wherein a man donning a coyote-skin-and-skull costume dances while a singer sings his tale, which laments the human feces strewn imaginatively about the Earth? Coyote, meantime, tries to get an onlooker to lick his genitals, and finally engages in public sexual intercourse with a female tribe member or two, then ends the dance by defecating. Though the Franciscans called such forbidden acts devilry , the Chumash maintained their Datura cult religion, along with the enforced Christianity. For the Chumash, the Earth was made of two enormous snakes that caused earthquakes when they slithered past one another—a vast reptilian tectonics. In the 20th century, long after Blessed Father Fray Junípero Serra and his cohorts had died, when asked by an anthropologist about religious contradictions, conflating the Datura and Christian cults, a Chumash man replied, incredulous: “But these are two different religions.” * When Portolá ordered that if by March 19th, the feast day of St. Joseph, the San Antonio had not arrived in San Diego Bay to relieve them, the Sacred Expedition to Nueva California would be abandoned, Blessed Father Fray Junípero Serra prayed a novena for San José’s intercession. And lo, a lookout sighted the San Antonio ’s sails—what seemed to the priest a miracle—that very Saint’s feast day. Europeans would stay in California, and Blessed Father Fray Junípero Serra would continue to reap a great harvest of souls for the Lord. By the end of mission secularization in 1836—sixty-six years after the San Antonio rescued the Spaniards—Native American populations in California had declined by seventy-three percent. * When Peter the Aleut would not renounce his Eastern Orthodox faith the padre of San Francisco had a toe severed from each foot with each refusal, totaling ten. The native Ohlones employed in this gruesome task—their obsidian chiseled knives tearing through skin and grinding bone—continued as per their orders, and cut off also each of Peter’s fingers (equals a total of twenty refusals). They quartered the martyr, spilled his bowels, as if from bear attack, attack by a bear in the shape of a Catholic. * Blessed Father Fray Junípero Serra absolutely believed that the slow rate of conversion for the native people was due to the influence of the Devil, who had been outraged by the coming of the Catholics to California, this region that he had long held in his dominion. * In his reception speech for the Nobel Prize for Literature, John Steinbeck said, “Man himself has become our greatest hazard and our only hope. So that today, St. John the Apostle may well be paraphrased: In the end is the Word, and the Word is Man—and the Word is with Men.” * In 1602, when Sebastián Vizcaíno and his friars sang mass on Catalina Island, as many as a hundred Pimungans witnessed the rite, asking by signs what it was about. According to Vizcaíno’s records, the Californians marveled not a little at the idea of Heaven and at the image of Jesus crucified. * Vizcaíno was brought to a prairie on Santa Catalina Island where the Pimungans worshipped their sun god. Upon the prairie they had placed an icon, a headless figure with horns protruding from the body, a figure that Vizcaíno predictably described as a demon. The Pimungans urged Vizcaíno not to approach the image of their deity, but he ignored them. He placed his crucifix against the wooden figurine and prayed the Our Father. Vizcaíno told the natives that his prayer was from Heaven, and that their god was the Devil. Vizcaíno held out his crucifix, encouraging the Pimungans to touch it and receive Jesus. He pointed at the sky and indicated Heaven. The Pimungans worshipped a sun deity, so they were impressed with this white man and his description of his god, for their gods seemed to be one and the same. It’s no wonder then that Vizcaíno’s diary reports the natives being pleased with this exchange. “Surely,” the diary says, “they will be converted to our Holy Faith.” * The Miwok women wailed and scratched at their faces when their men consorted with Sir Francis Drake and the other Englishmen who had landed on California’s coast in the summer of 1579. “The blood streaming downe along their brests, besides despoiling the upper parts of their bodies of those single coverings . . .they would with furie cast themselves upon the ground . . . on hard stones, knobby hillocks, stocks of wood, and pricking bushes.” Drake and his men fell themselves to their knees in prayer, their eyes Heavenward, so that the natives might see they prayed to God and they too might worship God then their eyes that had been so blinded by the deceiver might be opened. * Father Fray Antonio de la Ascención—Carmelite friar in Vizcaíno’s party—writes that the Indians of California can “easily and with very little labor be taught our Holy Catholic faith, and that they would receive it well and lovingly.” He calls for two hundred older and honorable soldiers to ensure brotherhood during the conquest, so that peace and love—the best tools to pacify pagans—should reign. The religious, the friar says, should likewise be wise and loving to easily quell animosities between Spaniards and the heathen, and therefore avoid war. The Spaniards should bring with them trinkets—beads, mirrors, knives—to distribute amongst the gentiles, so that they might come to love the Christians, and see “that they are coming to their lands to give them that of which they bring, and not to take away the Indians’ possessions, and may understand that they are seeking the good of their souls.” No women are to accompany the conquest, says Father Fray Antonio, “to avoid offenses to God.” * In 1955 Wallace Stevens admitted himself to St. Francis Hospital in Hartford, Connecticut. There, it’s rumored he converted to Catholicism before dying of stomach cancer, exclaiming to his priest after the baptism, “Now I am in the fold.” Stevens’s late-career poems seem less cynical, more in awe of being and death (read “Metaphor as Degeneration” from The Auroras of Autumn ). He could have chosen from at least three secular hospitals in Hartford at the time. * I was reading Stevens’s Collected Poems when I joined eHarmony and listed that as my “currently reading” book among the “more than twelve” books a year that I would read. I fell in love with my wife when she said, “Are you sending your work out to literary journals?” Prior to this, the first girl I talked to on the phone, when I explained my doctoral exams, said, “So, you’re like, reading Stephen King and stuff?” When I said not exactly she responded defensively: “He must be doing something right, since he makes all that money.” * Mom walked me, my brother, and sister, through the Stations of the Cross. We did this on Ash Wednesdays, or whenever she thought we needed extra God after church. It might’ve happened before church, though that’s unlikely because we were always late. Anyway, it’s easiest to walk the Stations of the Cross when there’s no one else around. To walk the actual Stations means one goes to Jerusalem and walks the Via Dolorosa to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. So the Stations elsewhere—usually paintings, or low-relief sculptures upon church walls—serve as a kind of virtual Dolorosa. Mom held our hands and started from the rear of Our Lady of Refuge: the First Station. Mom said we should say a prayer at each Station and to think of all the pain Jesus went through so that we could go to Heaven. It was hard to keep thinking about that one thing for so long. My mind went to that Saturday’s little league game, to the donut and chocolate milk (our after-church reward from Castroville Bakery), and as I grew older I thought about girls. When you’re thirteen you can’t not think about the girl’s butt in the pew in front of yours as she kneels and stands to pray throughout mass. * It grew increasingly juvenile to lie awake at night daring myself to utter a simple sentence. Even if I said I didn’t believe in God, wouldn’t He know the truth? He was omniscient, like a narrator. Even the idea of Him as a him ceased making sense. Not only did this come with a budding realization of my paternalistic culture, but due to the simple question of why? If God was everything, everywhere, all knowing, then why would he be a man? There’s that question: If God is a man then God must have a penis, and if so, what for? * The Catholic Church incorporates some modern scientific research into its dogma concerning the formation of the Universe, Solar System, and Earth, as well as evolution. According to Catholic doctrine, in approximately the fifth millennia BCE, humans began to worship the one true God. Those humans were Adam and Eve, though the Church says humans had been around for thousands of years prior to Adam and Eve. The Church claims to be infallible. Every time the Church changes its doctrine it remains infallible. * One Catholic writer, Tom Meagher, writes that “Modernism[—]the idea that we come to our beliefs individually through emotional or personal experiences[—]has crept into our Catholic schools.” * Catholics believe that evil spirits, given power through Original Sin, can imbue ordinary inanimate objects of everyday use. Thus, such objects should be blessed in order to induce in them the desire to serve the good. Such objects are not limited to, but include, “new ships and boats, railways and trains, bridges, fountains, wells, cornmills, limekilns, smelting furnaces, telegrams, steam engines, and machines for providing electricity.” * In The Sound of Music Julie Andrews and Christopher Plummer sing together: “Nothing comes from nothing, nothing ever could...” * To explain competing theories on the very early universe, and pre-verse would be another book. What was the inflaton? Did (mem)branes collide, initiating the Big Bang, as opposed to Lemaître’s primordial atom, a singularity? Without a unified theory there’s gravity hanging out there, fucking everything up. We cannot make sense of the mechanics of the Planck Epoch—0-10-34 seconds into the Universe’s creation—named for Max Planck, who stumbled into the discovery of quantum mechanics in the early twentieth century. * My students often ask if I believe in God, since I espouse evolution, the Big Bang, Science, reject a strictly biblical or creationist theory of the Universe. I tell them that yes, I believe in God, though not the God that they imagine one must believe in. * When questioned regarding the rumor that, before his death, founder of quantum mechanics Max Planck had converted to Catholicism, he replied that he did not believe “in a personal God, let alone a Christian God.” * Physicist and Catholic priest George Lemaître, who formulated the theory and wrote the 1946 book The Primeval Atom Hypothesis , was made a household name by then-detractor Fred Hoyle, who pejoratively referred to the idea as a “Big Bang.” * Suicide is a mortal sin. To end one’s own life one must have despair, which is to lose hope, which is to lose faith, and to disbelieve in God. * Archaeology has uncovered graffiti in all of California’s missions—Indian pictographs inscribed into the adobe, covered with layers of whitewash. Native deities and depictions of cultural practices show that tribespeople never fully gave up their native traditions even after baptism and coming to the missions. There was something inside Native Californians that would never die. (shrink)

Narrative analysis offers a compelling platform that organizations can use to engage with those whose world and worldview may be radically different. A narrative approach places stories as vehicles through which individuals, organizations, and groups socially construct their identity, culture, land, and their inter-relationships through time. Because part of the stakeholder approach includes consideration of stakeholders’ physical, relational, and ethical experiences, narratives hold great promise.

A funny, touching look at the life of a social media influencer who starts to question the #goals life she has created for herself. Every day, Élie motivates her hundreds of thousands of followers to become the best versions of themselves by posting videos of exercise routines and high-protein breakfast recipes. Far from the shy teenager that she was, she is now in a very public relationship with singer Samuel Vanasse, and together they have become one of the most popular (...) influencer couples in the country. She has succeeded. She shines. And yet, Élie worries that her life is not as flawless as she makes it seem on YouTube and Instagram. Between her obsession with the "ideal weight," her growing attraction to another man, her family's disdain for her career as a content creator and a collaboration with another influencer who Élie can't stand, a thought haunts her. What if, by trying to become everything she wanted to be, she's lost herself along the way? Suck it In and Smile is an intimate exploration of our obsession with appearances and the hypocrisies that appear when you must craft the perfect online life. (shrink)

The radio is a unique and powerful medium, particularly well‐suited for the sharing of ideas and teaching techniques of inquiry through demonstration. In this chapter, the author offers a few short comments on the goals of public philosophy before turning to a broader theoretical analysis of the radio. Walter Benjamin's work from the 1920s and 30s offers particularly illuminating insights into how we experience the medium of the radio. An analysis of his writings about the radio points to many (...) of the practical questions anyone pursuing public philosophy on the radio should consider. The author concludes by noting some important contemporary examples of public philosophy on the radio and a few words about the future of philosophy through radio. (shrink)

Vaccines are responsible for many global public health successes, such as the eradication of smallpox and significant reductions in other serious infections like diphtheria, pertussis, tetanus, polio and measles. However, mass vaccination has also been the subject of various ethical controversies for decades. Several factors need to be considered before any vaccine is deployed at national programme like the potential burden of disease in the country or region, the duration of the protection conferred, herd immunity in addition to individual protection, (...) vaccine-related risks, financing and the logistical feasibility of the large-scale vaccination. Moreover, several ethical dilemmas revolve around authority and mandates for vaccination, informed consent, benefits vs. risks, and disparities in access to vaccination. This review paper aims to elaborate the ethical issues involved in mass vaccination programme and present some additional challenges in the context of a resource-poor settings of public health in Bangladesh. (shrink)

Since patient autonomy became a prominent theme in medical ethics in the 1970s and 1980s, it has had a troubled reputation among many physicians, to whom claims for its importance in medical decision making seem unrealistic and even undesirable. Of course the discussion has moved on since the early days in which informative or interpretive models of medical decision-making—in which physicians provided information and helped patients clarify and express preferences that then determined decisions—were contrasted with usual medical practice characterized as (...) paternalism: physicians telling patients what to do and patients acquiescing in physician direction. The... (shrink)

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work.This work is in the public domain in (...) the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work.As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

In the framework of off-shell quantum electrodynamics—the quantum field theory of a covariant symplectic mechanics, in which events evolve according to a Poincaré-invariant parameter τ—we study the low-energy scattering of identical scalar particles. It is shown that exchange of mass is permitted in the formalism, and we calculate scattering cross-sections for this case. In these cross-sections, the usual forward pole of the standard scalar QED splits into two poles and a zero, slightly offset from the forward direction. As mass (...) exchange vanishes, a pole-zero pair cancel, the remaining pole moves to θ = 0, and the standard cross-section is recovered. (shrink)

An ongoing philosophical discussion concerns how various types of mental states fall within broad representational genera—for example, whether perceptual states are “iconic” or “sentential,” “analog” or “digital,” and so on. Here, I examine the grounds for making much more specific claims about how mental states are structured from constituent parts. For example, the state I am in when I perceive the shape of a mountain ridge may have as constituent parts my representations of the shapes of each peak and saddle (...) of the ridge. More specific structural claims of this sort are a guide to how mental states fall within broader representational kinds. Moreover, these claims have significant implications of their own about semantic, functional, and epistemic features of our mental lives. But what are the conditions on a mental state's having one type of constituent structure rather than another? Drawing on explanatory strategies in vision science, I argue that, other things being equal, the constituent structure of a mental state determines what I call its distributional properties—namely, how mental states of that type can, cannot, or must co‐occur with other mental states in a given system. Distributional properties depend critically on and are informative about the underlying structures of mental states, they abstract in important ways from aspects of how mental states are processed, and they can yield significant insights into the variegation of psychological capacities. (shrink)

It is commonly assumed that images, whether in the world or in the head, do not have a privileged analysis into constituent parts. They are thought to lack the sort of syntactic structure necessary for representing complex contents and entering into sophisticated patterns of inference. I reject this assumption. “Image grammars” are models in computer vision that articulate systematic principles governing the form and content of images. These models are empirically credible and can be construed as literal grammars (...) for images. Images can have rich syntactic structure, though of a markedly different form than sentences in language. (shrink)

Insurance is pervasive in many social settings. As a cooperative device based on risk pooling, it serves to attenuate the adverse consequences of various risks by offering policyholders coverage against the losses implied by adverse events in exchange for the payment of premiums. In the insurance industry, the concept of actuarial fairness serves to establish what could be adequate, fair premiums. Accordingly, premiums paid by policyholders should match as closely as possible their risk exposure. Such premiums are the product of (...) the probabilities of losses and the expected losses. This article presents a discussion of the fairness of actuarial fairness through three steps: defining the concept based on its formulation within the insurance industry; determining in which sense it may be about fairness; and raising some objections to the actual fairness of actuarial fairness. The necessity of a normative evaluation of actuarial fairness is justified by the influence of the concept on the current reforms of public insurance systems and the fact that it highlights the question of the repartition of the gains and burdens of social cooperation. (shrink)

In this single industry study, the authors examine relationships between forest products companies in Maine and their stakeholders. The research question, why do firms work with stakeholders, is examined from both instrumental and normative perspectives. Specifically, it is hypothesized that stakeholder power and corporate social responsiveness affect the degree to which firms have working relationships with stakeholders. The study found support for the impact of the firm’s perception of stakeholder power on the strength of its relationships with stakeholders. Most notably, (...) it also found support for the firm’s corporate social responsiveness on the strength of its stakeholder relations, indicating that firms do work with stakeholders from both instrumental and normative bases. (shrink)

Opponents of physician-assisted suicide (PAS) maintain that physician withdrawal-of-life-sustaining-treatment cannot be morally equated to voluntary active euthanasia. PAS opponents generally distinguish these two kinds of act by positing a possible moral distinction between killing and allowing-to-die, ceteris paribus. While that distinction continues to be widely accepted in the public discourse, it has been more controversial among philosophers. Some ethicist PAS advocates are so certain that the distinction is invalid that they describe PAS opponents who hold to the distinction as in (...) the grip of ‘moral fictions’. The author contends that such a diagnosis is too hasty. The possibility of a moral distinction between active euthanasia and allowing-to-die has not been closed off by the argumentative strategies employed by these PAS advocates, including the contrasting cases strategy and the assimilation of doing and allowing to a common sense notion of causation. The philosophical debate over the doing/allowing distinction remains inconclusive, but physicians and others who rely upon that distinction in thinking about the ethics of end-of-life care need not give up on it in response to these arguments. (shrink)

We respond to Morgan and Feeley’s critique on our article “Mass Media in Organ Donation: Managing Conflicting Messages and Interests.” We noted that Morgan and Feeley agree with the position that the primary aims of media campaigns are: “to educate the general public about organ donation process” and “help individuals make informed decisions” about organ donation. For those reasons, the educational messages in media campaigns should not be restricted to “information from pilot work or focus groups” but should include evidence-based (...) facts resulting from a comprehensive literature research. We consider the controversial aspects about organ donation to be relevant, if not necessary, educational materials that must be disclosed in media campaigns to comply with the legal and moral requirements of informed consent. With that perspective in mind, we address the validity of Morgan and Feeley’s claim that media campaigns have no need for informing the public about the controversial nature of death determination in organ donation. Scientific evidence has proven that the criteria for death determination are inconsistent with the Uniform Determination of Death Act and therefore potentially harmful to donors. The decision by campaign designers to use the statutory definition of death without disclosing the current controversies surrounding that definition does not contribute to improved informed decision making. We argue that if Morgan and Feeley accept the important role of media campaigns to enhance informed decision making, then critical controversies should be disclosed. In support of that premise, we will outline: (1) the wide-spread scientific challenges to brain death as a concept of death; (2) the influence of the donor registry and team-huddling on the medical care of potential donors; (3) the use of authorization rather than informed consent for donor registration; (4) the contemporary religious controversy; and (5) the effects of training desk clerks as organ requestors at the Department of Motor Vehicles offices. We conclude that organ donation is a medical procedure subject to all the ethical obligations that the medical profession must uphold including that of transparency and truthfulness. (shrink)

Despite the many successes of the relativistic quantum theory developed by Horwitz et al., certain difficulties persist in the associated covariant classical mechanics. In this paper, we explore these difficulties through an examination of the classical. Coulomb problem in the framework of off-shell electrodynamics. As the local gauge theory of a covariant quantum mechanics with evolution paratmeter τ, off-shell electrodynamics constitutes a dynamical theory of ppacetime events, interacting through five τ-dependent pre-Maxwell potentials. We present a straightforward solution of the classical (...) equations of motion, for a test event traversing the field induced by a “fixed” event (an event moving uniformly along the time axis at a fixed point in space). This solution is seen to be unsatisfactory, and reveals the essential difficulties in the formalism at the classical levels. We then offer a new model of the particle current—as a certain distribution of the event currents on the worldline—which eliminates these difficulties and permits comparison of classisical off-shell electrodynamics with the standard Maxwell theory. In this model, the “fixed” event induces a Yukawa-type potential, permitting a semiclassical identification of the pre-Maxwell time scale λ with the inverse mass of the intervening photon. Numerical solutions to the equations of motion are compared with the standard Maxwell solutions, and are seen to coincide when λ≳10−6 seconds, providing an initial estimate of this parameter. It is also demonstrated that the proposed model provides a natural interpretation for the photon mass cut-off required for the renormalizability of the off-shell quantum electrodynamics. (shrink)

In the context of a covariant mechanics with Poincaré-invariant evolution parameter τ, Sa'ad, Horwitz, and Arshansky have argued that for the electromagnetic interaction to be well posed, the local gauge function of the field should include dependence on τ, as well as on the spacetime coordinates. This requirement of full gauge covariance leads to a theory of five τ-dependent gauge compensation fields, which differs in significant aspects from conventional electrodynamics, but whose zero modes coincide with the Maxwell theory. The pre-Maxwell (...) fields may exchange mass with charged particles, permitting pair annihilation even at the classical level. The total mass-energy-momentum tensor of the fields and particles is conserved. The Green's functions for the fields provide spacelike and timelike support for correlations, as well as lightlike propagation. A τ-integration of the fields—singling out the massless photons—recovers the standard Maxwell theory, which then has the character of an equilibrium limit of the underlying microscopic dynamics. The pre-Maxwell theory also turns out to be the solution of the inverse problem in variational mechanics: it is shown to be the most general local gauge theory consistent with unconstrained commutation relations in four dimensions. Posed in this framework, the extension to n-dimensions, curved background space, and non-abelian gauge symmetry becomes straightforward. (shrink)

Suggestions that academic medicine is systemically racist are increasingly common in the medical literature. Such suggestions often rely upon expansive notions of systemic racism that are deeply controversial. The author argues for an empirical concept of systemic racism and offers a counter argument to a recent suggestion that academic medicine is systemically racist in its treatment of medical trainees: Anderson et al.’s (Academic Medicine, 98(8S), S28–S36, 2023) “The Long Shadow: a Historical Perspective on Racism in Medical Education.” Contra the authors (...) of “The Long Shadow,” the author argues that racial performance disparities in medical education cannot be validly attributed to racism without careful empirical confirmation; he further argues that standards of assessment in medical education cannot be properly deemed racist merely because minority trainees are disproportionately disadvantaged by them. Furthermore, the history of medicine and society in the Anglo-European West is not, as argued by the authors of “The Long Shadow,” best viewed as one long tale of racial oppression culminating in the present day pervasive racism of academic medicine in the United States. Racism is a deplorable stain on our history and our present but it is not the historical essence of Christianity, European civilization, Western medicine, or contemporary academic medical institutions. (shrink)

Status inequalities seem to play a fairly big role in creating inequalities in health. This article assumes that there can be good reasons to fight status inequalities in order to reduce inequalities in health. It examines whether the neorepublican ideal of non-dominance does a better job as a theoretical foil for this as compared to a liberal notion of non-interference. The article concludes that there is a prima facie case for incorporating non-dominance into our thinking about public health, but (...) that it needs to go hand in hand with a more traditional liberal ideal of non-interference. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:A Realm Without Angels: MENCs Partnerships with Disney and Other Major Corporations Julia EkIund Koza University of Wisconsin-Madison My interest in partnerships between the MENC: The National Association for Music Educators and major corporations such as Disney dates back to 1996 when I was invited to attend a free premiere screening of the movie Mr. Holland 's Opus.1 Never one to turn down anything free, in January of that (...) year I joined more than twenty-fivethousandmusiceducators, administrators, and friends ofthe arts, who gathered at fiftyone locations across the nation to watch the movie. Sponsored and promoted by theNational Coalition for Music Education, ofwhich MENC is a member, in cooperation with the National AcademyofRecordingArts and Sciences Foundation, the American Music Conference, and Hollywood Pictures (a Disney subsidiary), the promotional screening was the result of an education/business partnership. I did not like the film much even though I agreed with its message that public schools and public school music should be adequately funded, and I was sorry that MENC had entered into a partnership to promote it. Part ofthe problem may have been timing. I had recentlyreturned froma parental leave during whichIhad sufferedseriouspostpartumcomplications and had struggled fornearly a yearwithpoor health. January 1996 found me trying to figure out how I would manage a full-blown academic career, my still fragile health, and a lively child. Ibristledatthevisionsofprofessionalismfostered by Mr. Holland's Opus, recognizing that I would never again have the luxury he did of indulging myselfuninterruptedly in my career; I knew that I might never again be seen as a "real professional " even though I was more exhausted and working harder than I ever had. From my perspective the film's images of teachers, teaching, andprofessionalismwereprofoundlymasculinist; I also knew that a popular film can play a powerful role in shapingpublic imaginaries. Who tends tobenefit fromtheperpetuationoftheseimagesof teachers, teaching, and professionalism, I wondered? Who tends to be harmed? So my first step on this journey was to write a critique of Mr. Holland's Opus. I soon discovered that the film itselfwas but one small part of a much larger story about MENCs deepening involvement in education /business partnerships. One of the main themes of Mr. Holland's Opus is that budget cuts can have devastating effects on music programs. The education/business partnership forged to promote Opus and the manner in which the film was promoted suggested that the corporate world is socially responsible and genuinely concerned both aboutthe quality ofAmerican education and the demise of music education. In no way did they intimate that corporate practices may be at least partially responsible for any declines in the quality ofpublic schooling. I was also aware, however, of a corpus of scholarship suggesting that recent trends toward corporate partnerships and philanthropy are window-dressing at a time when corporations are sneaking out the back door carrying everything else in the store. Critics contend that on the one hand, corporationsengageinmuchpublicizedacts of gift-giving or school partnership, which cost the corporations relatively little (or in the case of Opus, result in considerable financial profit for the corporation), while on the other hand, they chisel away at the financial infrastructure of©Philosophy ofMusic Education Review 10, no. 2 (Fall, 2002): 72-79. Julia Eklund Koza 73 schools with unrelenting demands for special corporate tax cuts, breaks, and incentives. This practice is especially detrimental to the arts because, relegated to the feminized status of "frill," they may be among the first subjects to suffer. Tax breaks are but one example of what critics term "corporate welfare." John Hood, in Policy Review, provides a list ofincentives states use to attract and keep corporations. In addition to tax abatements and tax credits, Hood mentions land giveaways, releases from infrastructure costs, the issuanceoftax-exemptdevelopmentbonds, offers to promote products, and job training packages. These deals are unfair to existing businesses, Hood argues, especially small ones that can never hope to receive such treatment, and he concludes that there is no clear-cut evidence these forms of corporate welfare benefit state economies.2 Accordingto JayTaylor, school-business partnerships have become increasingly popular; they quadrupled between 1982 and 1992 as financially strappeddistricts found themselves "dredgingfor dollars."3 Taylor explains that "school officials... (shrink)

Recently, in the framework of a relativistic quantum theory with invariant evolution parameter, solutions have been found for the two-body bound state, whose mass spectrum agrees with the nonrelativistic Schrödinger energy spectrum. In this paper, we study the radiative transitions of these states in the dipole approximation and find that the selection rules are identical with those of the usual nonrelativistic theory, expressed in a manifestly covariant form. In addition to the transverse and longitudinal polarizations of the nonrelativistic theory, we (...) find a “scalar” transition, induced by the relative time coordinate, which is of the same type as the longitudinal transition, expressing the Lorentz covariance of the theory. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThe present article aims at examining the specific difficulties that the school form – the modern educational institution par excellence – faces in order to attain hospitality as the raison d'être of the educational process. Educational activity is here understood as a form of hospitality which involves caring for the newcomers and for the physical and symbolic place into which they arrive. A cinematographical narrative drawn from Bégaudeau’s Entre les Murs supplements this analysis of some of the challenges we (...) are faced with when dealing with students from different national backgrounds, beliefs and forms of life. (shrink)

This essay is an inquiry into the socio-cultural history of the use of forceps in 19th-century Mexico. It argues that the knowledge and practices that the use of such instruments implied were related to complex and controversial issues of the time regarding gender, race and national identity. In my study of operations involving forceps, I found that the adoption of medical instruments depended not only upon their supposedly greater operative efficiency but also upon the political and medical meanings attributed (...) to the pelves of Mexican women. Early 19th-century obstetrics conceived the womb as an example of ‘living nature’ whose qualities assured that births were ‘normally happy events’ making the use of forceps and other instruments unnecessary. However, by mid-century, in the aftermath of independence, Mexico was desperately attempting to forge its identity as a nation. Due to European theories of race, Mexican women came to be characterized as having pathologically deformed pelves that evidenced possible defects of racial formation. The analysis of operative practices involving forceps reveals just how strongly such medical instruments became charged with a complex political definition of the ‘mestizo race’, which was seen to hold political promise for the future. In this context, forceps ceased to symbolize the threat of death, with which they had been associated since colonial times, and became artefacts that helped to assure the safe delivery of newborn mestizos by overcoming the problems of Mexican women's pathological pelves; although by the same token, the status of women as biologically inferior beings in need of medical assistance was reconfirmed. (shrink)

Many students ask, 'What is the point of learning formal logic?' This book gives them the answer. Using the methods of deductive logic, Nelson Lande introduces each new element in exquisite detail, as he takes students through example after example, proof after proof, explaining the thinking behind each concept. Shaded areas and appendices throughout the book provide explanations and justifications that go beyond the main text, challenging those students who wish to delve deeper, and giving instructors the option of confining (...) their course to the basics, or expanding it, when they wish, to more rigorous levels. Lande encourages students to think for themselves, while at the same time providing them with the level of explanation they need to succeed. It is a rigorous approach presented in a style that is informal, engaging, and accessible. Students will come away with a solid understanding of formal logic and why it is not only important, but also interesting and sometimes even fun. It is a text that brings the human element back into the teaching of logic. --Hans Halvorson, Princeton University. (shrink)

This article reports on the methodology for setting the Mexican User Satisfaction Index for Social Programs as tested in seven national social programs. The evaluation is based on Structural Equation Modeling. How satisfaction takes the central place of the SEM, which postulates its causes and effects, contributes to the increased validity and reliability of satisfaction indicators that allow benchmarking between social programs. The MUSI model is an adaptation of the American Customer Satisfaction Index model. The MUSI methodology includes qualitative and (...) quantitative techniques. The estimation model is by the Partial Least Squares. In each of the seven social programs, no statistical evidence was found to reject the main relationships postulated by the ACSI’s model: that Perceived Quality impacts Satisfaction, and Satisfaction impacts Trust. The improvement opportunity areas were also identified for each program. These results give valid and reliable feedback to public policies. (shrink)

The paper presents Josefina Niggli, an American mid-twentieth-century writer who was born and grew up in Mexico, and her novel Mexican Village. A connoisseur of Mexican culture and tradition, and at the same time conscious of the stereotypical perceptions of Mexico in the United States, Niggli saw it as her literary goal to “reveal” the “true” Mexico as she remembered it to her American readers. Somewhat forgotten for several decades, Niggli, preoccupied with issues of marginalization, hybridization, and ambiguity, is now (...) becoming of interest to literary critics as a forerunner of Chicano/a literature. In her novel Mexican Village, set in the times of the Mexican Revolution, she creates a prototypical bicultural and bilingual Chicano protagonist, who becomes witness to the rise of Mexico’s modern national identity. (shrink)

Education research needs to think about their epistemological grounding. Important concepts like goals and needs can be evaluated through the sociology of education. The essay reviews the main traditions in the area, describes arguments and methods and analyzes the Mexican case.

Strategic managers today are faced with five critical judgment calls when formulating strategies for their companies: (1) Approaching strategy as an art or as a science, (2) publicizing the strategy or maintaining its secrecy, (3) seeking strategic consistency over the long term or maintaining flexibility, (4) embracing strategic risk or avoiding it, and (5) adopting a top-down or a bottom-up approach to strategic planning. This paper compares American and Mexican managers along these five areas. Findings suggest that conventional wisdom on (...) differences between American and Mexican managers in strategy formulation may not be true. Future research directions are also provided. (shrink)

How long new biomedical technologies are welcome paths for treatment of diseases or reduction of sufferings and where does the aspiration of human enhancement start? Are there basic criteria and standards for a demarcation or has this question to be answered pragmatically, based on a deliberated experience, open for the respective situation? In any case, a common understanding about boundary lines between elemental self-development and forced self-optimization is essential. The volume contains contributions to this burning issue given and debated (...) during the Berlin conference of the Protestant Research Academy (Evangelische Forschungsakademie) in January 2018 to stimulate a public discourse beyond pure scientific discussions. (shrink)

The study of Kant’s anthropology, proposed by Viktor Kozlovskyi in its original and thorough monograph, is an entirely new interpretation of Kant’s answer to the fundamental question “What is man?”. On the basis of the philosopher’s heritage and taking into account the large body of research lit-erature, Kozlovskyi reconstructs five conceptual “human models” in Kant’s anthropological discourse. However, this study contains a number of problematic statements and conclusions. I argue first, that there is some inconsistency between Kant’s understanding of (...) the concept of “anthropology” and Ko-zlovskyi’s explanation. Second, the model of man as intelligible being, made explicit through the con-cepts of “freedom” and “spontaneity”, is a justified construction within the limits of criticism, but not quite correct with regard to the place and function of “anthropology” in it. Third, we can see a disso-nance between Kozlovskyi’s explanation of the constellations as “chronotopes-events” and interpreta-tion of this concept by Dieter Henrich’s school, where the methodology of “research constellations” was used to elucidate the early phase of German idealism. However, this leads to the cardinal question of how far this methodology is applicable for the analysis of Kant’s philosophy. (shrink)

Review of Vassallo, C.. The Presocratics at Herculaneum. A Study of Early Greek Philosophy in the Epicurean Tradition. Berlin: De Gruyter.

L'analisi dell'aristotelismo «platonizzante» nell'ambito della filosofia araba prima della sistemazione della Shifa di Avicenna, secondo cui Dio non avrebbe conoscenza dei particolari, consente all'A. di dimostrare come ci siano stati anche approcci platonici ad Aristotele , che non sono passati attraverso il filtro dei neoplatonici greci. L'altra cosa significativa è il fatto che all'interno della scuola di Baghdad vi sono modi diversi di intendere lo stato ontologico degli universali. L'A. tenta anche di ridimensionare la figura di al-Farabi all'interno della scuola (...) di Baghdad. I filosofi considerati sono al-Farabi, Yahya b. Adi e Ibn al-Tayyib. (shrink)

Reasoned disagreement is a pervasive feature of public life, and the persistence of disagreement is sometimes troublesome, reflecting the need to make difficult decisions. Fogelin suggests that parties to a deep disagreement should abandon reason and switch to non-rational persuasion. But how are the parties to know when to make such a switch? I argue that Fogelin's analysis doesn't clearly address this question, and that disputes arising in areas like medical decision making are such that the parties to them have (...) reasons to act as if they can be rationally resolved even if they are deep. Fogelin's analysis is thus of limited value as regards the practical moral demand of addressing concrete moral dilemmas. (shrink)

The following conversation examines the role of the university in our present moment and examines the necessity of anti-colonial praxis in the academy. The dialogue takes as its starting point the long history of white, heteropatriarchal capitalist supremacy that has oriented the institutional production of knowledge and considers its present permutations in such practices as diversity initiatives in teaching and hiring. The discussants in turn reflect on their own approaches and strategies for enacting liberatory pedagogy in light of the contingent, (...) historical, and material limitations of higher education today. (shrink)