In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Recent Works on Confucius and the AnalectsRonnie LittlejohnConfucius and the Analects: New Essays. Edited by Bryan W. Van Norden. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. Pp. x + 342. Hardcover $65.00. Paper $24.95.Confucius: Analects with Selections from Traditional Commentaries. Translated by Edward Slingerland. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 2003. Pp. xxix + 279. Hardcover $18.00. Paper $10.95.I do not think I can remember reading a professional review of any scholarly work (...) beginning with the imperative "Rush out and buy these books!" But I am not embarrassed to open my comments about these two new volumes on the work of Confucius with just such advice. I think that these works should be included in the personal and institutional libraries of any public interested in classical Confucianism and the Analects. I will review them in the order of their publication. Accordingly, Professor Slingerland's work, although a translation and commentary on the Lun yu, will follow the set of essays compiled and edited by Professor Van Norden. Although this seems to be a rather straightforward procedure, the reader may well wonder whether Slingerland's translation and its extensive use of the commentarial tradition on the Analects in any way displaces one or more of the essays in Van Norden's collection. Remarkably, I did not find this to be true at all. I think this is a tribute largely to the Van Norden anthology and the quality of the scholarship represented by its contributors.The Van Norden collection contains ten essays. In part 1 there are four grouped under the heading "Keeping Warm the Old," and in part 2 there are six under the topic "Appreciating the New." This is a grouping inspired by Analects 2.11: "One who can keep warm the old, yet appreciate the new, is fit to be a teacher." The editor's principal reason for this division in the material is that the authors of the essays in the first section accept the canonical integrity of the Analects and its worldview (or at least they do not explicitly call this into question or depend on a text or form a critical analysis in any of their arguments). In contrast, the authors in the second section explore issues that have not been a part of the commentarial and interpretive tradition on Confucius or the Analects, and many of them employ a textual critical apparatus to buttress their arguments and hermeneutical constructions.Before I provide an overview of the component essays, I want to make a few observations about the "Introduction" written by Van Norden. While it is often the purpose of the editor of an anthology to preview the component essays in the collection, [End Page 99] this is not Van Norden's intention. Looking at the result, I must say that I am very grateful he did not follow the usual pattern. What Van Norden has provided is a readily accessible overview of China in the period before and after Confucius, and a very tight and up-to-date summary of the life of Confucius. It is the best five-page introduction I have found to the current literary and textual debate about the Analects arising from the work of Bruce and Taeko Brooks, and a very decent survey of key concepts in the Confucian philosophical lexicon taken from the Analects.The first essay in part 1 is "Naturalness Revisited: Why Western Philosophers Should Study Confucius" by Joel Kupperman of the University of Connecticut, who was a student of H. G. Creel at the University of Chicago in the mid-1950s. Kupperman holds that there are gaps in Western ethical philosophy that correspond to interesting and important lines of thought to be found in Confucius. What he has in mind specifically is an interest he finds in Confucius on matters of style and decorum in life. He thinks that Western thought has neglected the style of interpersonal interaction because of its preoccupation with moral choice and decision. Although he takes up two possible counterexamples (Nietzsche and Aristotle), I do not believe most readers will find his way of setting them aside to be very satisfying. His work in this part of the essay... (shrink)

1. The present paper is a continuation of my “Self-Ownership, World Ownership, and Equality,” which began with a description of the political philosophy of Robert Nozick. I contended in that essay that the foundational claim of Nozick's philosophy is the thesis of self-ownership, which says that each person is the morally rightful owner of his own person and powers, and, consequently, that each is free to use those powers as he wishes, provided that he does not deploy them aggressively against (...) others. To be sure, he may not harm others, and he may, if necessary, be forced not to harm them, but he should never be forced to help them, as people are in fact forced to help others, according to Nozick, by redistributive taxation. (shrink)

Global properties of canonical derivability predicates in Peano Arithmetic) are studied here by means of a suitable propositional modal logic GL. A whole book [1] has appeared on GL and we refer to it for more information and a bibliography on GL. Here we propose a sequent calculus for GL and, by exhibiting a good proof procedure, prove that such calculus admits the elimination of cuts. Most of standard results on GL are then easy consequences: completeness, decidability, finite model property, (...) interpolation and the fixed point theorem. (shrink)

One of the areas of concern raised by cross-border reproductive travel regards the treatment of women who are solicited to provide their ova or surrogacy services to foreign consumers. This is particularly troublesome in the context of developing countries where endemic poverty and low standards for both medical care and informed consent may place these women at risk of exploitation and harm. We explore two contrasting proposals for policy development regarding the industry, both of which seek to promote ethical outcomes (...) and social justice: While one proposal advocates efforts to minimize cross-border demand for female reproductive resources through the pursuit of national self-sufficiency, the other defends cross-border trade as a means for meeting the needs of vulnerable groups. Despite the conflicting objectives of the proposed strategies, the paper identifies common values and points of agreement between the two, including the importance of regulations to safeguard those providing ova or surrogacy services. (shrink)

The current Ebola epidemic has presented challenges both medical and ethical. Although we have known epidemics of untreatable diseases in the past, this particular one may be unique in the intensity and rapidity of its spread, as well as ethical challenges that it has created, exacerbated by its geographic location. We will look at the infectious agent and the epidemic it is causing, in order to understand the ethical problems that have arisen.

Relatively congruence regular quasivarieties and quasivarieties of logic have noticeable similarities. The paper provides a unifying framework for them which extends the Blok-Pigozzi theory of elementarily algebraizable (and protoalgebraic) deductive systems. In this extension there are two parameters: a set of terms and a variable. When the former is empty or consists of theorems, the Blok-Pigozzi theory is recovered, and the variable is redundant. On the other hand, a class of membership logics is obtained when the variable is the only (...) element of the set of terms. For these systems the appropriate variant of equivalent algebraic semantics encompasses the relatively congruence regular quasivarieties. (shrink)

Ecological theory is built upon assumptions about the fundamental nature of organism-environment interactions. We argue that two mutually exclusive sets of such assumptions are available and that they have given rise to alternative approaches to studying ecology. The fundamentally different premises of these approaches render them irreconcilable with one another. In this paper, we present the first logical formalisation of these two paradigms.The more widely-accepted approach - which we label the demographic paradigm - includes both population ecology and community ecology (...) (synecology). Demographic ecology assumes that the environment is relatively stable and that biotic processes, governed predominantly by resource availability, are the most important of ecological and evolutionary influences. Moreover, ecological processes are assumed to translate into directional selection pressures that drive significant evolutionary change on a local scale through the process of optimisation. (shrink)