The one clear insight which can be gleaned from the discussions of religious language by both theologians and philosophers is that its reference is to the transcendent. This is almost axiomatic in Philosophy of Religion nowadays, and we feel that the remarks of Milton's archangel to the first man are most appropriate when he insists that all the conceptions we have of God or of the spiritual world are but inadequate symbols. Though this view has a long history, it does (...) not seem to have been at all general in antiquity. It may be said to have begun with Plato and then to have continued through later generations in Neo-Platonism till it mingled with the Christian tradition. We can see how easily such traditions were fused when we look at the fusion of Platonism and Judaism in Philo of Alexandria. This is how he expounds the Exodus passage where Moses is allowed to see the back, but not the face, of God: Everything which is subsequent to God the virtuous man may apprehend: God alone is inapprehensible. That is to say, God is not apprehensible by direct frontal approach—for such approach would imply God's being disclosed such as He is: but He is apprehensible through the Powers which are consequent upon His being; for those Powers do not present His being, nature, essence but only His existence from the resultant effects. (shrink)

During the mid-nineteenth century the annual tuberculosis mortality in the penitentiaries at Auburn, N.Y., Boston, and Philadelphia exceeded 10 percent of the inmate population. At the beginning of the sanatorium era, 80 percent of the prison deaths were attributed to TB. As the mountain air was “commonly known” to be healthful, the first prison sanatorium was opened in the mountains near Dannemora, N.Y. in 1904. It served to isolate contagious prison inmates until the advent of effective chemotherapy for the disease (...) in the 1950’s. Early antibiotic therapy for TB was such a great success that the public health aspects of TB in prisons remained dormant for the next 40 years.In 1991, a correctional officer from Auburn Correctional Facility in Auburn, New York died as a result of multidrug-resistant TB. He had been posted to care for hospitalized patients, from whom he acquired his disease. This death, and the transmission of TB infection to health care workers in the same hospital, brought the nature and extent of modern inmate medical care into finer focus. (shrink)

The North African maritime frontier in the period under review in this chapter presents a paradox. On the one hand, there was a situation in which, to borrow J. S. Bromley's luminous phrase, ‘two societies, two conceptions of justice, collaborated and collided’. Bromley was referring to the contemporary Caribbean world of the late seventeenth-century boucaniers, but, equally, in the western Mediterranean, and on the land frontier of the North African littoral, there was a common maritime culture which shared many traits (...) across the religious divide. In the context of the Ottoman frontier, the discussion suggests that a British archive-based archaeography of the Ottoman North African maritime frontier for the entire period from 1660 to the end of the eighteenth century and even into the early nineteenth is a subject which both has something to contribute and deserves to be taken further. (shrink)

In a recent re-assessment of the medical aspects of the Plague of Athens which is, to date, the most scholarly and comprehensive, Poole and Holladay have emphasized the tendency of many infectious diseases markedly to decline in virulence over decades and centuries and, sometimes, significantly to change their clinical manifestations. In the light of modern medicine they consider four possibilities: The Plague was a disease which still exists today. This they regard as improbable, It still exists in some remote place (...) or places unknown to medical science. This is discussed and dismissed, It became extinct, It was caused by an agent which nowadays causes a significantly different clinical syndrome. They conclude as follows: ‘The truth, we suggest, almost certainly lies in possibility or . But we can see no way of choosing between them. On either view the question: “What was the Athenian Plague?” is in principle unanswerable if the questioner is wanting to attach to the Plagsie the name of some modern disease or diseases’. (shrink)

Involuntary autobiographical memories (IAMs) and déjà vu are phenomena that occur spontaneously in daily life. IAMs are recollections of the personal past, whereas déjà vu is defined as an experience in which the person feels familiarity at the same time as knowing that the familiarity is false. We present and discuss the idea that both IAMs and déjà vu can be explained as natural phenomena resulting from memory processing and, importantly, are both based on the same memory retrieval processes. Briefly, (...) we hypothesise that both can be described as “involuntary” or spontaneous cognitions, where IAMs deliver content and déjà vu delivers only the feeling of retrieval. We map out the similarities and differences between the two, making a theoretical and neuroscientific account for their integration into models of memory retrieval and how the autobiographical memory literature can explain these quirks of daily life and unusual but meaningful phenomena. We explain the emergence of the déjà vu phenomenon by relating it to well-known mechanisms of autobiographical memory retrieval, concluding that IAMs and déjà vu lie on a continuum. (shrink)

This chapter proposes a way to conceptualize journalism as both engaged and objective, called “democratically engaged journalism.” It is a “third way” between partisan and neutral journalism. The chapter argues that democratically engaged journalism is the moral ideology that journalism needs to respond to a toxic sphere of digital, global media.The chapter begins by defining engagement, disengagement, and democratically engaged journalism, using a continuum of kinds of journalism. Then it considers how democratically engaged journalism replies to a range of possible (...) objections concerning the role of facts, emotions, and neutrality. It concludes by identifying four duties for democratically engaged journalism. (shrink)

Pathological tremor is a common but highly complex movement disorder, affecting ~5% of population older than 65 years. Different methodologies have been proposed for its quantification. Nevertheless, the discrimination between Parkinson’s disease tremor and essential tremor remains a daunting clinical challenge, greatly impacting patient treatment and basic research. Here, we propose and compare several movement-based and electromyography-based tremor quantification metrics. For the latter, we identified individual motor unit discharge patterns from high-density surface electromyograms and characterized the neural drive to a (...) single muscle and how it relates to other affected muscles in 27 Parkinson’s disease and 27 essential tremor patients. We also computed several metrics from the literature. The most discriminative metrics were the symmetry of the neural drive to muscles, motor unit synchronization, and the mean log power of the tremor harmonics in movement recordings. Noteworthily, the first two most discriminative metrics were proposed in this study. We then used decision tree modelling to find the most discriminative combinations of individual metrics, which increased the accuracy of tremor type discrimination to 94%. In summary, the proposed neural drive-based metrics were the most accurate at discriminating and characterizing the two most common pathological tremor types. (shrink)

Moral strangerhood is due in part to competing worldviews. The profession of nursing is experiencing a paradigm shift which creates ethical dilemmas for both Christian nurses and Christian patients. Nursing's new focus on spirituality and spiritual care presents itself as broadly defining a desired state or patient outcome — spiritual integrity — supposed to be applicable to all patients of all faiths. Analysis of nursing's definition of spirituality reveals assumptions and values consistent with an Eastern/New Age worldview which may cause (...) hostility towards Christian patients stereotyped as dogmatic or noncompliant. (shrink)

In this note we present a three-valued intensional logic, which is an extension of both Montague's intensional logic and ukasiewicz three-valued logic. Our system is obtained by adapting Gallin's version of intensional logic (see Gallin, D., Intensional and Higher-order Modal Logic). Here we give only the necessary modifications to the latter. An acquaintance with Gallin's work is pressuposed.

(2015). Embodied Relational Knowing and Lifeworld-Led Care as Core Dimensions of Authentic Professional Practice. Indo-Pacific Journal of Phenomenology: Vol. 15, No. 1, pp. 1-4.

The distinction between the Bible as literature and the Bible as scripture is largely artificial. The church can properly hear its Bible as scripture only when it reads it as literature.

This chapter explores the future of global media ethics by focusing on a question that is a cause of misunderstanding and, perhaps, its greatest conceptual challenge: What is the goal of global media ethics? The chapter argues that the image of global media ethics has been distorted by the view that a global ethic must consist of one, uniquely correct set of principles affirmed by a large majority of journalists around the world. Instead, the chapter proposes the idea of global (...) media ethics as plural in structure and method, as different discourses across different cultures. The future of global media ethics is participation in webs of de-centered discourse about the changing world of global media. (shrink)