The growing concentration of wealth has acquired a new urgency in recent years. One particular view in this context is developed by Ingrid Robeyns in her ground-breaking work on limitarianism. According to this view, no one should have more than a certain amount of valuable goods, such as income and wealth. The contributors to this symposium, Brian Berkey, David Axelsen and Lasse Nielsen, Jessica Flanigan and Christopher Freiman, and Lena Halldenius, critically examine various aspects of limitarianism. In particular, they examine (...) how limitarianism should be interpreted and developed as a principle of justice, on what reasons speak in favour and against limitarianism, and on how limitarianism relates to other principles of distributive justice. Our hope is that this symposium will contribute to the ongoing debate in political philosophy about the concentration of wealth and economic justice. (shrink)

For 150 years Africans have been longing for a Christianity which is not the -White man's religion.- Missionaries have often failed to strip the Western cultural -garb- from their presentation of the gospel. Emerging African theologians in rapidly expanding congregations are beginning to formulate an explicitly African theology. The Christian message must be contextualized within the local culture if it is to be communicated effectively in the daily life of the African Christian. This book shows how missionaries and African Christians (...) can work together to find timeless biblical principles and allow those principles to directly impact African culture.". (shrink)

In this article I trace the legal and cultural advocacy work of Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), the single largest Christian conservative legal organisation operating in the US today. I begin by locating ADF strategy within the longer history of Christian persecution rhetoric articulated by the Moral Majority during the 1970s and 1980s. I then analyse both legal and cultural outputs of the organisation in two key cases: the so-called bathroom bills limiting transgender access to public facilities in several states, and (...) the service denial of florist Barronelle Stutzman. I argue that by emphasising the perceived vulnerability of white cisgender women and girls in these cases, ADF litigators and cultural producers advance a narrow conception of religious freedom rights located in the specific cultural politics of neoliberal, white evangelicalism. As a result, while these cases have been legislative and policy failures for ADF they nevertheless provide useful insight into the rhetorical project of Christian persecution. (shrink)

This article examines the definitions of place or location (topos) and as a consequence, space, in Byzantine philosophy, from Maximos the Confessor to Photios. These philosophers draw, on one hand, on the Aristotelian, Platonic, and Neoplatonic sources, and on the other hand, on the Judeo-Christian tradition. Firstly, Maximos the Confessor sets out a novel definition in which place is conceptually inseparable from time, is needed for substances to exist, and in which place is the boundary between the created and uncreated. (...) In Anastasios of Sinai’s writing, God is the archetypical place for all things and is likewise necessary for substances. John of Damascus, in contrast, extends Aristotle’s definition of place in the Physics in new directions, by investigating the place of angels, which is determined by their incorporeal limits. Finally, Photios produces a systematic and astute account of how the properties of the containing and contained bodies come together to make places. The article concludes with an evaluation of these theories, and briefly considers their relationship to theories of place and location in modern physics. (shrink)

The juxtaposition of models of God and Christian faith may seem repugnant to many, as models are tentative and faith aims at an abiding certainty. In fact, for many Christians, using models of God in worship amounts to idolatry. By examining Biblical and extra-Biblical views of idolatry, I argue that models are not idols. To the contrary, the practice of God-modeling inoculates Christians against one of the most seductive idols of our age: the love of certainty. Furthermore, by examining meditations (...) upon certainty in Melville’s Moby Dick and the early discourses of the Buddha, I suggest that overweening conviction is a vice that hinders rather than guarantees Christian discipleship, and that Christian faith is better defined as any or all of the following: relative confidence in propositions, faithful relationship, and a virtue of disciplined credulity. (shrink)

Facial expressions of pain may be best conceptualized as an example of an evolved propensity to communicate distress, rather than as a distinct category of facial expression. The operant model goes beyond the evolutionary account, as it can explain how the (facial) expression of pain can become maladaptive as a result of its capability to elicit attention and caring behavior in the observer.

The figure of the Palmyrean queen Zenobia plays an important part in three vitae of the Historia Augusta. The discrepancy in her representation was attributed to different sources or different authors. Since the representation of Zenobia even changes within one vita, there is no need to assume different authors. Being a counterpart to Gallienus, Odaenathus and Aurelianus, the figure of Zenobia changes correspondingly to these male figures. Her voluntary submission to the real – male – emperor finds an equivalent in (...) the nation's voluntary submission to the real – male – ruler. The category of gender proves valuable in the analysis of characterisation and text intention. The vita Aureliani is interpreted as deconstructing the panegyric tones of the vitae Gallieni and triginta tyrannorum. (shrink)

Ovid’s poetic descriptions of Rome are not as vivid, as pictorial as one tends to suppose. In the poems from exile the lack of detail and the flat imagery seem to be programmatic. Thus, the reader’s attention is directed to the metapoetic message conveyed, by bringing into focus the role of enargeia/evidentia and the rivalry between literature and the visual arts. Evidence for this hypothesis is furnished by passages from the “Metamorphoses”, the “Tristia” and the “Epistulae ex Ponto” as well (...) as by statements concerning the ancient theory of evidentia. (shrink)

Les sciences cognitives ont redonné de l’actualité au vieux problème des localisations cérébrales, qui a souvent été un motif à plaisanteries. Quant à la question plus philosophique de la localisation de l’esprit, des auteurs comme Peirce, James, Wittgenstein et actuellement Vincent Descombes, ont imaginé délocaliser l’esprit, pour mieux réputer dénuée de sens l’idée même d’un lieu du mental et critiquer le localisationnisme qu’on retrouve chez les cogniticiens aujourd’hui.

Die Paragonefrage, erstmals ausgiebig von Leonardo diskutiert, besitzt im gesamten Quattrocento eine rege Vorgeschichte, die bei allen frühen Impulsen durch Petrarca als die entscheidende Phase der Formierung der Debatte betrachtet werden muss. Spektakuläre Textfunde der Humanisten, Kunsttraktate, auch eigenhändig von Malern oder Bildhauern verfasst, die Blüte an Vielfachbegabungen, öffentlichen Künstlerwettbewerben und gattungsmäßigen Grenzüberschreitungen verliehen dem wertenden Vergleich der Künste im Italien des 15. Jahrhunderts sein ganz eigenes Gepräge. Erstmals steht dieses - mitsamt dem Fundus an eruierten Quellen - im Zentrum (...) einer grundlegenden Monographie. Leonardos argumentativer Eigenanteil gewinnt ebenso Konturen wie die Genese der Diskussion. Vorweg zweiseitig bemalte Bildnistafeln wie Leonardos Porträt der Ginevra de ́ Benci bieten mit Steinimitationen und Versen spannungsreiche "Übergriffe" in die Nachbargattungen. Für Piero della Francesca waren sie Programm, als er das vierteilige Landschaftspanorama im buchartigen Montefeltro-Diptychon zum Ariadnefaden einer poetischen Erzählung machte. (shrink)

Der Aufsatz reagiert auf Peter Bieris Kritik der analytischen Philosophie und argumentiert, dass Begriffsklärung zwar innerhalb eines Rahmens wissenschaftlicher Sprache stattfinde, philosophische Grundbegriffe – so genannte kategoriale Begriffe – sich aber selbst nicht mehr innerhalb dieses Systems klären lassen. Alle philosophischen Grundbegriffe können zwar klar erkannt, ihrerseits aber nicht vermittels deutlicher Begriffe bestimmt werden. Deshalb rekurriert etwa Frege zur Erläuterung der Unterscheidung zwischen den kategorialen Begriffen „Begriff“ und „Gegenstand“ auf die Metapher des Ungesättigten. In Grundlagenfragen wird auch der analytische Philosoph (...) zum Metaphoriker beziehungsweise genauer: zum Katachretiker. (shrink)

Two essential periods may be identified in the early stages of the history of vitamin D-resistant rickets. The first was the period during which a very well known deficiency disease, rickets, acquired a scientific status: this required the development of unifying principles to confer upon the newly developing science of pathology a doctrine without which it would have been condemned to remain a collection of unrelated facts with very little practical application. One first such unifying principle was provided by the (...) notion of hygiene; while the blanket explanations provided by this notion alone were much too general to enable rickets to achieve scientific status, it did point out the need to look for specific external causes for the disease and to examine the life-style and dietary habits of the patients. The second phase of the conceptualization of the disease was the assumption of a specific cause — that is, using concepts developed in the area of infectious diseases. This was made possible by fundamental similarities between deficiency and infectious diseases, in spite of their apparent differences. Both types of illness have some of the characteristics of what Georges Canguilhem calls the ontological representation of disease as opposed to dysharmonic representations, which primarily concern the endocrine diseases. It is precisely this shift from one to the other manner of perceiving ill health that enabled the identification of the vitamin D-resistant rickets. Conceptualization of the notion of vitamin D resistancy required that the conditions causing the disease be looked for within the organism rather than outside it; this was thus the first time that endocrine concepts were applied to studying the physiology of vitamin D.The history of resistant rickets therefore represents an interesting model for understanding the growth of biomedical knowledge. It allows the development of a number of more general ideas on the question of the relationship between biology and medicine and on the thorny problem of specificity in medical thinking. As far as this topic is concerned it can be seen that there was an ongoing exchange between medical and biological thinking during the initial period up until 1937, and that one could deny any such specificity in medical thinking during this same period. Albright, for example, used human diseases as spontaneously produced models for experimental biology. It was also more feasible for an experimental biologist to administer toxic doses than for a clinician to do so.What, then, if any, is the place of the specificity of medical thinking in this history? The fact that medicine is characterized not only by it ccognitive content78 but also by its final aim, which is to restore health, makes it necessary to take factors other than objective knowledge into consideration. This is particularly evident in two aspects of medicine, therapeutics and nosology, and in approaching the notion of pathological individuality.Therapeutic activity has a largely empirical approach. Many drugs, such as cod-liver oil, were discovered empirically. Treatment often in the past, and still now, has proceeded by trial and error, upon no established theoretical basis. At this level the relationship between biology and medicine is roughly comparable to that between science and technology79 \3- that is, it is impossible to reduce either therapeutics or technical activities to the simple application of basic science. In this sense, the application of vitamin D to vitamin-resistant rickets is quite typical. Further-more, in the case studied here, the therapeutic activity heralds a definite breaking away from the medicatrix naturae of conventional medicine dating back to ancient times, and it embodies a new concept of the organism and of disease: no longer can the diseased organism be thought of as merely having a perturbed equilibrium requiring restoration by means of a natural style of medicine. On the contrary, vitamin D resistance is an obstacle that indicates profound biological dysfunction, to be rectified only by means of an extremely aggressive and therefore dangerous therapy. The therapy thus serves to reveal the severity of the dysfunction, thereby leading inevitably to conceptual innovation. This sheds light on the theoretical innovations of which the therapeutic activity is capable.Therapeutic activity is also influenced by notions of health and illness, normal and pathological states, none of which may be determined entirely objectively. For example, the term healing as used by Albright in the case of resistant rickets that he described may be discussed in this light.Nosology, or the classification of diseases, depends largely on the description of clinical syndromes, which are themselves mainly based on subjective elements (discomfort, disability, or the extent of a patient's suffering). The advent of pathological anatomy at the beginning of the nineteenth century disrupted classification by introducing the concept of localized anatomical lesions81-and, hence, an element of material objectivity \3- into nosology. Radiological examination further complicated matters by enabling the equivalent of an autopsy on living matter. Lastly, biological examination complicated nosology by showing that biological anomalies may exist in human beings without necessarily leading to a pathological condition. Medical thinking can choose to combine all these elements to describe a disease, but can also separate them and retain only a few, or a single one, according to requirements - as did Albright.The notion of biological and pathological individuality is fundamental to the development of medical thinking. Whatever its theoretical origin, medical thinking has since ancient times incorporated the idea that each individual reacts differently to the same treatment and his own specific pathological tendencies. I mentioned earlier that in the history of vitamin D-resistant rickets the notion of rachitic tendency reflected this type of thinking. After 1937, this history progressed by successively separating new individual entities, affecting smaller and smaller groups of individuals in each case. In other words, the need to understand and to define individual illness more closely required the development of new concepts and the construction of new individual categories of disease linking these concepts to older clinical, radiological, and biochemical elements. (shrink)

Cross-sectional studies indicate that normal aging is accompanied by decreases in brain structure. Longitudinal studies, however, are relatively rare and inconsistent regarding their outcomes. Particularly the heterogeneity of methods, sample characteristics and the high inter-individual variability in older adults prevent the deduction of general trends. Therefore, the current study aimed to compare longitudinal age-related changes in brain structure in two large independent samples of healthy older adults ; the Longitudinal Healthy Aging Brain database project at the University of Zurich, Switzerland, (...) and 1000BRAINS at the Research Center Juelich, Germany. Annual percentage changes in the two samples revealed stable to slight decreases in cortical thickness over time. After correction for major covariates, i.e., baseline age, sex, education, and image quality, sample differences were only marginally present. Results suggest that general trends across time might be generalizable over independent samples, assuming the same methodology is used, and similar sample characteristics are present. (shrink)

The political significance of masses is more obvious than ever. The aim of this article is to develop a conceptualization capable of capturing the dangerous as well as promising aspects of masses. It argues that, intricately, the dangers and fruitful potentials of masses are born out of the same fundamental structural features. We may differentiate analytically between different kinds of masses, but all masses contain elements of ambiguity. The mass conceptualization developed builds on a critical, deconstructing interpretation of selected Bataille (...) texts centering on ontological features of individuality and collectivity. Especially, Bataille’s concepts of ‘myth’ and ‘sacrifice’ are accentuated and critically transformed. Contemporary examples of masses – right-wing anti-establishment movements, Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter – are presented and reflected through the prism of sacrifice, with the aim of highlighting the multifaceted and complex nature of the dynamics of masses. (shrink)

Cet article cherche à examiner le problème du relativisme de Wittgenstein. Est-ce un banal relativisme culturel ou quelque chose d’autre? En tout cas, une version forte de relativisme est réfutée dans les Remarques sur le « Rameau d’Or » de Frazer. Mais si la position de Wittgenstein est modérée, ce qui ne l’est pas est le holisme fort soutenu dans De la certitude, un de ses derniers écrits. Dans ce livre, la notion de vérité devient problématique à mesure que Wittgenstein (...) semble se rapprocher du pragmatisme de Dewey. (shrink)

The target article emphasizes the need to identify psychological mechanisms underlying grandparental investment, particularly in low-risk family contexts. We extend this approach by addressing the changing demands of balancing work and family in low-risk families. Taking a lifespan psychological perspective, we identify additional motivators and potential benefits of grandparental investment for grandparents themselves and for subsequent generations.

For decades, Christiane Northrup has been helping women navigate their lives with grace and joy. This elegant, compact volume offers her trademark wisdom in a fresh form, filled with pointed reminders "to help you develop a deeper respect for, and connection to, your own body and its exquisite guidance system [to] create a vibrantly healthy body, mind, and spirit." Each beautifully designed black-and-white page carries a quote that touches on a topic of deep significance: everything from heart-listening to epigenetics (...) to the importance of knowing that your decisions about medical treatment are not irreversible. Examples include:You are an ever-renewing, ever-changing, ever-growing being, born with an inner guidance that helps you create and maintain vibrant health and happiness. / When faced with a dilemma, take a moment to sit with the issue. Don't rush to decide what to do. Intend to let Divine inspiration flow to you, and it will be so! The next time you get an ache or a pain, soften the area around it with compassion. Ask your body what it needs. Listen deeply for the answer. (shrink)

This article proposes the use of technological frames (TF) as an analytical tool to support the investigations within value sensitive design. TF can help to identify values that are consistent or conflicting within and between stakeholders, which is exemplified with a case of patient accessible electronic health records in Sweden. The article concludes that TF can help to identify values, which may then help to understand and address possible concerns in the design process.

Nach langer Krankheit starb Friedrich Nietzsche im Alter von 55 Jahren. Dieser Bericht gibt einen detaillierten chronologischen Überblick über die Symptome und Zeichen seiner Krankheit, die bereits im Kindesalter begann. Es wird ausfürlich diskutiert, dass Nietzsches Multisystemerkrankung alle Kriterien für die Diagnose eines MELAS-Syndroms erfüllt. Diese genetische Erkrankung wird ausschleßlich von der Mutter vererbt. Die Diagnose Neurosyphilis, die im Jahre 1889 in Basel und in Jena gestellt wurde, war wahrscheinlich ein typischer Irrtum der Zeit. After prolonged illness, Friedrich Nietzsche died (...) at the age of 55 in Weimar/Germany. This article gives a detailed overview of the signs and symptoms that started already in Nietzsche's childhood. It is discussed that Nietzsche's multisymptom disease meets all criteria for the diagnosis of MELAS syndrome, a genetic disorder inherited by his mother. The diagnosis of general paralysis of the insane that was made on his admission in Basel and Jena ind 1889 was most likely a typical medical error of the time. (shrink)