Conservation planning is only as good as the science on which it relies. This paper evaluates the science underlying the least-cost-path model, developed by Meegan and Maehr (2002) , for the Florida panther, Puma concolor coryi. It also assesses the resulting claim that private lands in central Florida are desirable for panther colonization (Maehr et al. 2002a , p. 187; Maehr 2001 , pp. 3–4; Maehr and Deason 2002 , p. 400). The paper argues that (...) class='Hi'>panther conservation planning, as proposed by Maehr, is flawed because of its (1) poor analysis of panther-habitat requirements, owing largely to use of only daytime telemetry, a black-box model, and failure to take account of spatial and temporal uncertainties; (2) use of stipulative and misleading definitions of key biological terms, such as “forest obligate” and panther “dispersal”; (3) employment of question-begging value judgments to rank habitat; (4) weak testing of the model; (5) inconsistency in evaluation of forest habitat; (6) inconsistency in evaluation of agricultural lands; and (7) inconsistency in assessing effects of highways on panther habitat. (shrink)

In a world of massive extinctions where not all taxa can be saved, how ought biologists to decide their preservation priorities? When biologists make recommendations regarding conservation, should their analyses be based on scientific criteria, on public or lay criteria, on economic or some other criteria? As a first step in answering this question, we examine the issue of whether biologists ought to try to save the endangered Florida panther, a well known glamour taxon. To evaluate the merits (...) of panther preservation, we examine three important arguments of biologists who are skeptical about the desirability of panther preservation. These arguments are (1) that conservation dollars ought to be spent in more efficient ways than panther preservation; (2) that biologists and conservationists ought to work to preserve species before subspecies; and (3) that biologists and conservationists ought to work to save habitats before species or subspecies. We conclude that, although all three arguments are persuasive, none of them provides convincing grounds for foregoing panther preservation in favor of other, more scientifically significant conservation efforts. Our conclusion is based, in part, on the argument that biologists ought to employ ethical, as well as scientific, rationality in setting conservation priorities and that ethical rationality may provide persuasive grounds for preserving taxa that often are not viewed by biologists as of great importance. (shrink)

In this volume, the authors discuss what practical contributions ecology can and can't make in applied science and environmental problem solving. In the first section, they discuss conceptual problems that have often prevented the formulation and evaluation of powerful, precise, general theories, explain why island biogeography is still beset with controversy and examine the ways that science is value laden. In the second section, they describe how ecology can give us specific answers to practical environmental questions posed in individual case (...) studies, and argue for a new way to look at scientific error. A case study using the Florida panther is examined in the light of these findings. (shrink)

Comparing alternative scientific theories obviously is relevant to theory assessment, but are comparativists (like Laudan) correct when they also make it necessary? This paper argues that they are not. Defining rationality solely in terms of theories' comparative problem-solving strengths, comparativist philosophers of science like Laudan subscribe to what I call the irrelevance claim (IC) and the necessity claim (NC). According to IC, a scientific theory's being well or poorly confirmed is "irrelevant" to its acceptance; NC is the claim that "all (...) evaluations of research traditions and theories must be made within a comparative context," how any theory "compares with its competitors" (Laudan 1977, 21, 120). Using current competing theories (T1 and T2) of population viability assessment (PVA) for the Florida panther, the paper investigates IC/NC. In part because dominant T2 panther biologists accept IC/NC (which T1 theorists reject), the paper argues that they appear both to have accepted flawed T2 and to have contributed to flawed panther science and policy. Correcting Laudan's Comparativist Philosophy of Science (LCPS), underlying the T1-versus-T2 debate, thus may hold promise for helping resolve both the scientific and policy controversy over panther PVA. (shrink)

ABSTRACT In 1978, the evolutionary biologist Robert Trivers and Huey P. Newton, cofounder of the Black Panthers, began a collaboration exploring the evolution of self-deception. Together they published a brief paper that used their ideas about the naturalistic basis of deceit and self-deception to explain the crash of Air Florida Flight 90 in Washington, D.C. Given the continued power of the naturalistic fallacy in the modern life sciences, historical attention typically focuses on highly visible controversies with great popular traction. (...) This essay instead mobilizes the muted legacy of Trivers and Newton's publication to underscore the inherent difficulties scientists face in finding a receptive audience for their theories, even naturalistic ones. (shrink)

The ethical theories employed in health care today assume, in the main, a modern Western philosophical framework. Yet the diversity of cultural and religious assumptions regarding human nature, health and illness, life and death, and the status of the individual suggest that a cross-cultural study of health care ethics is needed. A Cross-Cultural Dialogue on Health Care Ethics provides this study. It shows that ethical questions can be resolved by examining the ethical principles present in each culture, critically assessing each (...) value, and identifying common values found within all traditions, It encourages the development of global awareness and sensitivity to and respect for the diversity of peoples and their values and will advance understanding as well as help to foster a greater balance and a fuller truth in consideration of the human condition and what makes for health and wholeness. (shrink)

T'Challa, the Black Panther, wears many hats, both at home and abroad. He is the chieftain of the Panther Tribe, which makes him the spiritual leader of his people as well as the king of Wakanda and its head of state. One key aspect that separates virtue ethics from its rival moral theories, consequentialism and deontology, is its focus on character. Judgment, or what Aristotle called "practical wisdom", is the ability to decide how best to act on one's (...) virtues in a particular situation. When T'Challa believed that agents within the US government were helping to overthrow his own, he and the Dora Milaje drove a truck into a building and abducted a businessman involved in the operation. T'Challa's duties as an Avenger come into conflict with his role as king of Wakanda, but other conflicts result from his role as a spiritual leader, which he regards as more important. (shrink)

Wakandan women can play stereotypically male roles because of the political construction of Wakandan identity. Wakandan women emerge, for starters, in a radically different cultural context than women of color in other countries and cultures. Despite their tacit representation of feminist ideals, Wakandan women resist the full‐throated feminism we associate with the modern era: the no‐husband, no‐children feminism championed by the French philosopher Simone de Beauvoir. In 1966 Black Panther, the Marvel comic superhero, made his debut during the height (...) of second‐wave feminism. Back in Wakanda, M'Baku's renouncement of Shuri's non‐domestic activities makes an implicit appeal to the feminine mystique. Recognizing feminist and womanist elements within Wakanda helps explain the masculine and feminine performances of Wakandan women. Demystifying Wakanda requires us to recognize and reckon with The Panther Mystique : uncoerced appropriations of masculine and feminine norms for the sake of collective, communal freedom. (shrink)

Black Panther, directed by Ryan Coogler, became one of the highest grossing films of all time. It also received a lot of critical attention for its direct engagement with black experience and black politics. It speaks to the legacy of slavery and the exploitation of African-Americans and the ongoing post-colonial struggle represented most starkly by the Black Lives Matter Movement. However, the film was also criticised for supposedly leaving that radical black politics behind, even demonising it in its lead (...) antagonist, Killmonger, and instead proposing a liberal, reformist agenda very much in keeping with current forms of sovereign power, bolstered under the current neoliberal regime by the charity of billionaires. To some extent this is understandable, but it is also a very limited reading of what happens in the film and does a disservice to the radical dissent that the character of Killmonger represents. To address this, the paper uses the concept of sovereignty and asks how superheroes can help us unpack this concept. It argues that rather than seeing superheroes as vigilantes, thinking of them as sovereigns helps us unpack the complex knot of law, authority and violence that is key to understanding it. In particular it draws on Agamben’s discussion of sovereignty and the politics of the exception, and how this might be relevant to Fanon’s work on counter-colonial violence to show how the film remains true to radical protest throughout. On the way it also addresses the important cultural politics of the original comic. (shrink)

Black Panther presents an African cultural tapestry. The wide breadth of the African elements fit Black Panther well within Afrofuturism, a genre defined by its use and placement of people of African descent in the past, present, and future of society. Beyond these cultural elements, Black Panther 's Afrofuturism employs water imagery and spinal cord injury as potent symbols of disconnection and reconnection. Black Panther draws from a long tradition of Afrofuturist literature that is influenced by (...) a desire to remedy the injuries of the past and reconnect people of African descent with the continent from which they've been severed. Black Panther 's Afrofuturism reimagines antebellum slavery society's flight fantasy as a powerful science fiction, T'Challa's Royal Talon Flyer. The narratives of T'Challa, Shuri, and Wakanda have been continuously remolded and expanded upon since the 1960s by artists who have been inspired by other Afrofuturist works. (shrink)

In his essay “The Panthers Can’t Save Us Now” and his new book of the same title, Cedric Johnson persuasively argues for a multiracial, class-based movement toward racial justice, but he questions whether the legacy of the Panthers is suitable for this strategy. This essay argues that the Panthers in fact advocated for the very strategy Johnson recommends, and that they ought to be considered exemplars of the socialist rejection of elite identity politics.

When the character of Black Panther first appeared in Fantastic Four no. 52 in July 1966, legendary creators Stan Lee and Jack Kirby didn't just write a story about another hero with extraordinary powers, they birthed the first Black superhero. For Lee, "it was a very normal thing," because "A good many of our people here in America are not white. You've got to recognize that and you've got to include them whatever you do." While it might've seemed normal (...) to Lee, Black Panther's (and Wakanda's) significance cannot be overstated. After all, the first Black superhero isn't just a Black superhero, he's the King of an African nation endowed with otherworldly powers, and Wakanda isn't just an African nation, it's the most advanced civilization the Earth has ever seen. Indeed, it shouldn't be lost on us that when Black Panther was introduced (during the Civil Rights era of the 1960s) the thought of a Black President-or an advanced, futuristic African society-would have been, well, unthinkable for too many people. (shrink)

Here I want to examine two different ways of viewing/reading Black Panther. I will call the first reading the Standard Morality Reading (SMR). I will call the second reading the Liberation Morality Reading (LMR). I argue that these two readings, and the forms of morality that influence them, are in tension with each other throughout the movie. They also produce a tension or moral struggle in King T’Challa and the citizens of Wakanda in general.

Many aspects of how humans form and combine concepts are notoriously difficult to capture formally. In this paper, we focus on the representation of three particular such aspects, namely overexten- sion, underextension, and dominance. Inspired in part by the work of Hampton, we consider concepts as given through a prototype view, and by considering the interdependencies between the attributes that define a concept. To approach this formally, we employ a recently introduced family of operators that enrich Description Logic languages. These (...) operators aim to characterise complex concepts by collecting those instances that apply, in a finely controlled way, to ‘enough’ of the concept’s defin- ing attributes. Here, the meaning of ‘enough’ is technically realised by accumulating weights of satisfied attributes and comparing with a given threshold that needs to be met. (shrink)

: As a form of in vivo knowledge, the transdisciplinary methodology suggests going beyond disciplines. According to Nicolescu, this methodology occurs at different levels of reality, different levels of perception, and within the logic of the included middle axioms that exist simultaneously. In addressing these levels, the researcher is the interlocutor between the external world of the Object and the internal world of the Subject. In architecture, this knowledge emerges through a variety of disciplines that need to be fused with (...) an approach that is rhizomatic and nomadic, leading to thought without an image as characterized by Deleuze and Guattari. By following their “Pink Panther” metaphor for an imageless thought and approach in TR, this article aims to understand the relationship between the TR methodology and the theory of thought without an image - an approach which can enable the comprehension of ambiguous architecture and urban design problems. Resumo: Como um conhecimento in vivo, a metodologia transdisciplinar sugere ir além das disciplinas. Segundo Nicolescu, essa metodologia ocorre em distintos níveis de realidade, em diferentes níveis de percepção e na lógica do terceiro incluído, que existem simultaneamente. Ao abordar esses níveis, o pesquisador é a correspondência entre o mundo externo do Objeto e o mundo interno do Sujeito. Na arquitetura, esse conhecimento surge por meio de uma variedade de disciplinas que precisam ser combinadas e fundidas com uma abordagem rizomática e nômade, levando ao pensamento sem imagem, como tratado por Gilles Deleuze e Félix Guattari. Seguindo a metáfora da “pantera rosa” para um pensamento sem imagem e abordagem em TR, que não imita ou reproduz outra coisa, o objetivo deste artigo é compreender a relação entre a metodologia TR, a teoria do pensamento sem imagem - uma abordagem que pode permitir a compreensão de arquitetura ambígua e problemas de projeto urbano. (shrink)

For most of the contributions to this volume, the project is this: Fill out “Event X is a cause of event Y if and only if……” where the dots on the right are to be filled in by a claims formulated in terms using any of (1) descriptions of possible worlds and their relations; (2) a special predicate, “is a law;” (3) “chances;” and (4) anything else one thinks one needs. The form of analysis is roughly the same as that (...) sought in the Meno, and the methodology is likewise Socratic—proposals, examples, counterexamples, more proposals. The norms of the enterprise seem to be as follows (i) a proposal is defeated if someone can imagine a circumstance in which it would be false, or perhaps if one can imagine such a circumstance that is not obviously inconsistent with physical laws; (ii) approximately correct solutions, those which cover most but not all cases, are of no value unless they can be modified to cover all cases; (iii) no account is required of how the relations in the right hand side of a proposed analysis could be known or reliably.. (shrink)

Shaul Magid's Meir Kahane: The Public Life and Political Thought of an American Jewish Radical (2021) stresses the American character of Kahane's thought. This review analyzes this claim in two ways. First, it offers a transnational perspective on Kahane's philosophy. Second, it examines Magid's concept of neo‐Kahanism in light of Kahane's legacy in Israel.

While many have celebrated Black Panther, some have also criticized it – such as contemporary philosopher Christopher Lebron, who argues that Black Panther 's plot is centrally driven by anti‐Black stereotypes about Black Americans, and particularly about Black American men. Anti‐colonial theory emerges in situations of colonial domination. But there are different kinds of colonialism, and there are different manifestations of anti‐colonial resistance. The image of colonialism that Black Panther most directly invokes – stopping short, however, of (...) openly recognizing it – is really just one species of colonizatism. As previously noted, Black Panther rarely invokes the concepts of slavery and colonialism. In Black Panther, Killmonger is the very site at which the terror of colonial history is sutured – the anti‐heroic figure who must be depicted as a genocidal and misogynistic monster in order to dissipate the shame and the guilt he would otherwise elicit. (shrink)

In this book, Haught chronicles the war over teaching evolution in Florida's schools, from the first shouts of religious persecution and child endangerment in Tallahassee in 1923 to the forced delays and extra public hearings in state-level textbook adoptions today.

In this article, I channel the autobiography of Black Panther cofounder Huey P. Newton, entitled Revolutionary Suicide, against the misogyny of the alt-right movement today. Both Newton and the alt-right have been powerfully influenced by Nietzsche, but one way of grasping the central difference between them is by comparing their conceptions of Dionysus. While the alt-right sticks closer to Nietzsche’s conception, which minimizes the god’s androgyny, Newton’s thought resonates with that androgyny, thereby bringing him closer to the most influential (...) Dionysus scholar since Nietzsche, Walter Otto. I therefore turn to the latter’s Dionysus: Myth and Cult, whose analyses I synthesize into the following image inspired by the god’s closest animal familiar: the dancingly-graceful panther as aqueous-androgynous soul-hunter. Reimagining Newton’s Black Panther in this way, finally, can help us overcome the alt-right. (shrink)

The ethics of tax evasion has been discussed sporadically in the theological and philosophical literature for at least 500 years. Martin Crowe wrote a doctoral thesis that reviewed much of that literature in 1944. The debate revolved around about 15 issues. Over the centuries, three main views evolved on the topic. But the business ethics literature has paid scant attention to this issue, perhaps because of the belief that tax evasion is always unethical. This paper reports the results of an (...) empirical study of opinion in Utah and Florida. A survey of accounting students was conducted to determine the extent of their agreement or disagreement with the 15 main issues that Crowe (1944) identified plus three more recent issues. The arguments that have been made over the centuries to justify tax evasion were ranked to determine which arguments are strongest and which are weakest. Scores were compared between samples to determine whether the responses were significantly different. (shrink)

On April 7,2000 a Florida jury ordered the tobacco industry to pay $12.7 million in compensatory damages to three former smokers who were chosen to represent hundreds of thousands of Florida residents in an unprecedented class action lawsuit. The decision not only marks the first time that a jury has found on behalf of smokers in a class action lawsuit, it also sets the stage for a huge punitive damage award against the industry. The awards followed a finding (...) by the same jury last July that the cigarette manufacturers have “acted with reckless disregard” and “engaged in extreme and outrageous conduct” while conspiring to mislead the public about the health risks of smoking. These previous findings make it likely that there will be punitive damages levied against the tobacco companies when the jury reconvenes in May. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to cast new light on the textual constitution of some passages of Apuleius. For ca. 15 passages of Florida as well as for 5 passages of Apologia a new textual solution is proposed.

The George W. Bush ascent to the presidency lacks a true precedent in the United States History. It is true that in three previous elections (1824, 1876 and 1888) it happened that a candidate gained the popular vote and the other the electoral vote. But that was not the distinctive characteristic..

It is dehumanising to identify people in terms of colour. Stereotyping and discrimination come with racial identification. Black identity has been expressed in different forms over the centuries. For a long period black identity was a constructed identity assigned to black people through a white-dominated matrix. After the end of slavery, efforts were made to reconstruct black identity. This developed into two divergent lines: one resulting in an illusionary identity as identified by Frantz Fanon and a second line of thought (...) of a continued search for a true authentic black identity as explicated by the Cameroon-born philosopher Achilles Mbembe. This process of creating a new authentic black identity is still ongoing and viewed by some as a pessimistic futile attempt. An example of the ongoing attempt for establishing an authentic black identity is illustrated by the movie Black Panther, which attempts to portray a different side of being black. (shrink)

In this paper, I reconstruct the conception of political will implicitly developed by the ‘philosophical theoretician’ of the Black Panther Party, Huey P. Newton. Counterintuitively, I argue that his ‘dialectical’ account of political will is best understood through categories derived from G.W.F. Hegel. Briefly, both Hegel and Newton identify abstract negation and situational concretion as equally essential to actualizing the free will, and thus advocate the channeling of revolutionary enthusiasm into reformist modes of institutional transformation. I conclude by arguing (...) that it is precisely this collective, but contested, unity of revolutionary and reformist tendencies that the Black Panther Party itself embodies. (shrink)

This book examines the conservative theory that guided Jeb Bush's behavior and the aggressive manner in which he used the Office of Governor to pursue his goals. It offers insight into his motivations and competencies and analyzes the extent to which his self proclaimed 'revolution' achieved its goals in Florida.

One of the remarkable features of the turmoil surrounding the counting and recounting of votes in the State of Florida in the 2000 US Presidential Election was the frequency with which "the Rule of Law" was invoked. Whether the antagonists in Florida knew it or not, they are in fact aspects of a venerable heritage of contestation that comes down to us as part and parcel of the Rule-of-Law tradition. The fact that "the Rule of Law" has always (...) evoked this contestation has led some to surmise that an old article by a linguistic philosopher, W.B. Gallie, entitled, "Essentially Contested Concepts" might afford the most fruitful basis for approaching the analysis of the term. (shrink)