In his last writings, Wittgenstein repeatedly addresses the question of how our concepts relate to general facts of nature or human nature and how they are embedded in our lives. In doing so, he uses the term “pattern of life”, characterizing the complicated relationship between concepts and our lives and how our concepts “are connected with what interests us, with what matters to us” (LWPP II, 46). But who is this “us”, and whose interests manifest in the concepts we use (...) to designate patterns of life? What if certain concepts—or their absence—are exclusionary, discriminatory, or otherwise unjust to those who are not “us”? In this paper, I want to discuss Wittgenstein’s notion of “pattern of life” in its interweaving with facts, human life, and concepts, as well as its political implications. To this end, I will first outline the relationship between facts and concept formation as Wittgenstein drew it in his last writings. Based on this, I will argue that he uses the concept of pattern of life to capture the complicated relationship between concepts and human nature or “social facts”. Going beyond Wittgenstein and drawing on recent feminist epistemology, I will raise the question of the political implications of our patterns of life and concomitant social “conceptual injustices”. Finally, I will show how imagining facts otherwise and other conceptual worlds can help us to reveal the prejudices and injustices of our concepts and can lead to conceptual change and new patterns of life that may ultimately even change “things”, i.e., our thinking, judging and acting in the world. (shrink)

Key ideas in the work of Michel Foucault are explored and applied to the organized pursuit of knowledge in higher education. His association of power and knowledge accounts for deeply rooted practices in higher education that would need to be mediated or overcome for there to be a revolution in inquiry to occur, such as the one advanced by Nicholas Maxwell. Foucault’s concepts of disciplinary power and bio-power, and how they act to manage the behavior of free citizens, are described. (...) These concepts are then applied to free inquiry, to show how the activity of individual inquirers is managed and how critical inquiry is controlled. The management of inquiry involving four norms, two of them intrinsic to inquiry and the other two extrinsic, is explained. The potential of Foucault’s concept of discursive formations is introduced as a means of reconceiving inquiry to overcome these impediments to a revolution in inquiry. (shrink)

The Lovász local lemma (LLL) is a technique from combinatorics for proving existential results. There are many different versions of the LLL. One of them, the lefthanded local lemma, is particularly well suited for applications to two player games. There are also constructive and computable versions of the LLL. The chief object of this thesis is to prove an effective version of the lefthanded local lemma and to apply it to effectivise constructions of non-repetitive sequences.The second goal of this thesis (...) is to categorize some classes of cohesive powers. We completely describe both the isomorphism types of cohesive powers of equivalence structures and injection structures, as well as clarify the relationship between these cohesive powers and their original structures. We also describe the finite condensation of cohesive powers of computable copies of the integers as a linear order by cohesive sets whose complement are computably enumerable.Finally, we investigate the possibility of decomposing problems in the Weihrauch degrees into a product of first order part and second order part. We give a preliminary result in this direction.Abstract prepared by Daniel Mourad.E-mail: daniel.mourad@uconn.eduURL: https://daniel-mourad.scholar.uconn.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/2530/2023/06/ThesisFinalWithRevisions-2.pdf. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to explore the possibility of a new form of right that is both antidisciplinarian and liberated from ‘sovereignty’, the term Michel Foucault uses for what he claims to be the traditional theme of modern political philosophy. Some attempts to derive a theory of right from Foucault’s critique have been made. However, by their own admission they do not yield a coherent and adequate theory, and other work has demonstrated the major problems inherent in Foucault’s (...) critique that render such a project problematic. This paper takes a different approach by revising the philosophical foundations of modern democracy with the goal of developing a new theory of right that addresses the problems that Foucault identified. To provide a theoretical context for this exploration, Foucault’s key concepts of disciplinary technologies, power, the construction and maintenance of human subjects, and the role of the human body in human subjection are briefly reviewed. The main analysis will focus on the ideas of three political theorists whose respective works represent the core of ‘sovereignty’, and who are indisputably basic to any student of Western political theory, namely Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau. The aim of this analysis is not to provide another critique of their virtues and shortcomings. Instead, the work of these thinkers is used in a pragmatic way, to elicit a new form of right that could serve as a counter to disciplinary power. Key Words: civil right • Enlightenment • Foucault • natural right • political philosophy • political theory • postmodern critique • social justice. (shrink)

This article examines Catherine Malabou’s philosophical concept of plasticity as a new materialist methodology. Given that plasticity simultaneously maintains the ability to receive, give, and annihilate form, plasticity and plastic readings offer material-discursive possibilities for educational research. This article begins by discussing the evolution of plasticity, applications thereof, and its location within new materialist philosophy. To then demonstrate the possibilities of plasticity, this article takes the example of educational policy reform in relation to technology-centered models of education. A plastic reading (...) of ongoing policy discourses argues that conceptualizing policy, stakeholders, and technology as plastic contribute new scholarly understandings regarding the shape and movement of educational policy formation. Significantly, the methodology of plastic readings provides an ideal lens through which to approach educational policy development as a series of entangled ideas and interests. In addition, plastic readings enable the re-envisioned types of analysis and critique increasingly called for by qualitative methodologists and new materialist scholars. (shrink)

Professor Mourad Wahba outlines how the philosophy of Averroes, who was an important influence on the Western Enlightenment, might now offer us a much needed with the Islamic world.

Night eating syndrome is currently classified as an Other Specified Feeding or Eating Disorder under the Diagnostic Statistical Manual−5. This systematic review aims to consolidate the studies that describe the sociodemographic, clinical and psychological features of NES in a population of patients with eating disorders, obesity, or those undergoing bariatric surgery, and were published after the publication of the DSM-5. A further aim was to compare, where possible, NES with BED on the aforementioned variables. Lastly, we aimed to appraise the (...) quality of the studies being included in the review. We conducted a systematic search on three databases which resulted in the selection of 22 studies for the review. We included the articles that studied patients with NES and their sociodemographic, clinical and psychological features in a clinical population, through a quantitative study design. Articles were excluded if the NES patients included in the study had a comorbid psychological disorder, and/or the sample was collected from a university/non-clinical population, and/or the study design was qualitative, and/or NES features were compared with any other disorder, except BED. Our study found that no conclusions about the link between any sociodemographic feature and an NES diagnosis could be made. Further, NES patients presented with elevated ED pathology and higher occurrence of depressive symptoms than controls. Contrary to the literature suggesting that NES and Binge Eating Disorder patients often report overlapping features, questioning the validity of NES as an ED diagnosis, we found that BED can be differentiated from NES by the higher occurrence of emotional eating, body related concerns and abnormal eating episodes. The review also suggested an overlap between NES and Sleep-Related Eating Disorder. We recommend that it is essential to study NES as an independent disorder to further develop its diagnostic criteria and treatment options, thereby, increasing the quality of life of the patients suffering from this syndrome. (shrink)

Incomplete penetrance and variable expressivity are non‐Mendelian phenomena resulting in the lack of correlation between genotype and phenotype. Not withstanding the diversity in mechanisms, differential expression of homologous alleles within cells manifests as variations in penetrance and expressivity of mutations between individuals of the same genotype. These phenomena are seen most often in dominantly inherited diseases, implying that they are sensitive to concentration of the gene product. In this framework and the advances in understanding the role of microRNA (miRNA) in (...) fine‐tuning gene expression at translational level, we propose miRNA‐mediated regulation as a mechanism for incomplete penetrance and variable expressivity. The presence of miRNA binding sites at 3′ UTR, co‐expression of target gene–miRNA pairs for genes showing incomplete penetrance and variable expressivity derived from available data lend support to our hypothesis. Single nucleotide polymorphisms in the miRNA target site facilitate the implied differential targeting of the transcripts from homologous alleles. (shrink)

Este documento provee un panorama de las posibilidades, pero también de la problemática de la colaboración inter y transdisciplinaria. La principal característica de la sustentabilidad es la complejidad y el entrelazamiento, por lo que el trabajo de adaptación en este ámbito es complejo y variado. Para las resoluciones de los problemas del contexto de un desarrollo sustentable no son suficientes simples causas–mecanismos de acción–descripciones. Son necesarios procedimientos que satisfagan la complejidad, que le den uso cotidiano, y que además no corran (...) peligro de ser simplificados. En la primera sección, se presentan en primer lugar la inter y la transdisciplinariedad como principios adecuados, con cuya ayuda es posible elaborar amplias soluciones para problemáticas complejas. Para solucionar integralmente los complejos problemas sustentables, se han desarrollado en los últimos años distintos métodos (de investigación), los cuales en este momento se aplican en la investigación y enseñanza. Se trata en este caso de enfoques, los cuales no pertenecen a una disciplina particular de investigación, sino que las entrecruzan. Con la meta de lograr datos para las soluciones de problemáticas complejas en la práctica, se presentan en la segunda sección los enfoques inter- y transdisciplinarios en este momento más discutidos y aplicados. La última sección presenta un resumen de los distintos métodos mencionados. (shrink)

This article studies the ideological identity of the authors of the Rasā’il Ikhwān al-Ṣafā’ and addresses the question of the authorship of the other works attributed to the Brethren of Purity. Based on these theosophical works, it provides new evidence for the authors’ political stance against the Abbasid state and confirms their Shii inclination and opposition to the Abbasid caliphs of their time. These findings highlight the Ikhwān’s involvement in political activities through preaching the end of the “state of evil” (...) and the beginning of the “state of good”. It also contributes to the debate on the Ikhwān’s relation to other political opposition movements against the Abbasid reign and their links to the Shii states. (shrink)

This article defends a regulative ethics of voluntary belief. In order to determine the occasion and the scope of such an ethics, the article begins with an examination of the concept of belief in conversation with the view of J. L. Schellenberg. Next, against the dominant position in contemporary epistemology, it argues that some beliefs can be voluntary, in the sense that they are under the immediate control of the believer, and replies to William Alston's influential objections to doxastic voluntarism. (...) If some beliefs are subject to the immediate control of the believer, then in these cases believers are ethically responsible not only for how they investigate those beliefs, but also for the choice of whether or not to believe them. The article concludes by formulating and defending two types of regulative ethical principles governing voluntary belief. (shrink)

Certified nursing assistants (CNAs) provide the majority of direct care to nursing home residents in the United States and, therefore, are keys to ensuring optimal health outcomes for this frail older adult population. These diverse direct care workers, however, are often not recognized for their important contributions to older adult care and are subjected to poor working conditions. It is probable that social‐based discrimination lies at the core of poor treatment toward CNAs. This review uses perspectives from critical social theory (...) to explore the phenomenon of social‐based discrimination toward CNAs that may originate from social order, power, and culture. Understanding manifestations of social‐based discrimination in nursing homes is critical to creating solutions for severe disparity problems among perceived lower‐class workers and subsequently improving resident care delivery. (shrink)

Previous research has demonstrated that self-involvement enhances the memorability of information encountered in the past. The emergence of this effect, however, is dependent on guided evaluative processing and the explicit association of items with self. It remains to be seen, therefore, whether self-memory effects would emerge in task contexts characterized by incidental-encoding and minimal self-involvement. Integrating insights from work on source monitoring and action recognition, we hypothesized that the effects of self-involvement on memory function may be moderated by the extent (...) to which encoding experiences entail volitional processing. The results of three experiments supported this prediction. Despite the adoption of an incidental task context and stimulus materials that were inconsequential to participants, the act of selection enhanced the memorability and accessibility of information. The implications of these findings for contemporary treatments of self are considered. (shrink)

Nursing has evolved, yet media representation has arguably failed to keep up. This work explores why representation has been slow in accurately depicting nurses' responsibilities, impacts on public perceptions and professional identity. A critical realist review was employed as this method enables in-depth exploration into why something exists. A multidisciplinary approach was adopted, drawing from feminist, psychological and sociological theories to provide insightful understanding and recommendations. One main feminist lens has been implemented, using Laura Mulvey’s ‘Male-Gaze’ framework for content analysis (...) of three nurse-related advertisements to explore how the profession's female status influences representation, public perception and how this might impact nursing. Nurse representation has important real-world consequences. It is essential to improve unnecessary negative portrayals and contest ingrained stereotypes as there are costs to public opinion and nursing's self-identity. Nursing's female status has an impact within a male-dominated media industry, with a leisurely approach adopted toward changing representation. Media images become societally ingrained, this reiterates the significance of accurate/positive depictions. Social media is an instant method of communication with the public to combat stereotypes and maintain engagement to provide better understanding of what nurses do. (shrink)

Introduction: Burnout, inertia, meltdown, and shutdown have been identified as important parts of some autistic people’s lives. This study builds on our previous work that offered early academic descriptions of these phenomena, based on the perspectives of autistic adults.Objectives: This study aimed to explore the unique knowledge and insights of eight autistic children and youth to extend and refine our earlier description of burnout, inertia, and meltdown, with additional exploration of shutdown. We also aimed to explore how these youth cope (...) with these phenomena and what others around them do that make things better or worse, with a hope to glean knowledge to design better supports.Methods: One-to-one interviews were conducted with eight children and youth, who shared their experience with BIMS. To match individual communication strengths of children and youth, we took a flexible approach to interviews, allowing for augmentative communication systems and use of visual images to support verbal interviews, as needed. We conducted a reflexive, inductive thematic analysis, using an iterative process of coding, collating, reviewing, and mapping themes.Findings: Our analysis has identified that these youth describe BIMS as a multi-faceted experience involving emotional, cognitive and physical components. Moreover, these multifaceted experiences are often misunderstood by neurotypical adults, which contributes to inadequate support in managing BIMS. Of the four experiences, these youth identified meltdowns as most common.Conclusion: By gaining first-hand perspectives, we have identified novel insights into BIMS and developed a more holistic understanding of these phenomena. These youths’ descriptions of supportive strategies for BIMS stress the importance of compassion and collaboration from trusted adults. This new knowledge will provide a foundation for how to better support autistic children and youth. Further research is required to develop an understanding of BIMS, especially with respect to how it is experienced by children and youth. Future research should leverage the insights and experiential knowledge of autistic children and youth to co-design support tool for BIMS. (shrink)

Organizations today recognize that it is not only important to engage in corporate social responsibility, but that it is also equally important to ensure that information about CSR is communicated to audiences. At times, however, the CSR image perceived by audiences is not an accurate portrayal of the organization’s CSR identity and is, therefore, incongruent with the desired CSR image. In this paper, we build upon the nascent work on organizational impression management by examining CSR communication from an impression management (...) perspective. The model developed here proposes that incongruence between desired and current CSR images motivates an organization to decrease the incongruence through CSR communication. This relationship is moderated by four factors: importance of CSR image to the organization; power, status, and attractiveness of the target audience; importance of CSR image to the target audience; and media attention and public scrutiny. The model also identifies four dimensions of CSR communication structure and includes a feedback loop through which audience interpretation of the CSR communication can influence the organization’s CSR image incongruence. Two illustrative examples are provided to indicate how the model may be applied to organizations. This paper has several implications for research and practice. It draws connections between impression management theory and CSR and adds to the emerging literature on organizational impression management. It can also help organizations decide on the appropriate CSR communication structure to use in specific situations and be more effective in their CSR communication. (shrink)

Why is it more violating to grab a stranger’s thigh or stroke their face than it is to grab their forearm? Why is it worse to read someone’s dream journal without permission than it is to read their bird watching field notes? Why are gestation mandates so incredibly intrusive? Intimacy is key to understanding these cases, and to explaining many of our most stringent rights. -/- I present two ways of thinking about intimacy, Relationship-First Accounts and the Intimate Zones Account. (...) I argue that only the Intimate Zones Account lets us cohesively understand intimacy’s importance, and the scope of our intimate rights. I characterize our intimate zones as meeting the Hiddenness and Importance Conditions. A feature’s meeting these conditions makes it a locus of special vulnerability by which our persons can be fundamentally altered. This special vulnerability explains why our duties to respect the intimate boundaries of others are so strict. (shrink)

Past research reveals a tension between children's preferences for egalitarianism and ingroup favoritism when distributing resources to others. Here we investigate how children's evaluations and expectations of others' behaviors compare. Four- to 10-year-old children viewed events where individuals from two different groups distributed resources to their own group, to the other group, or equally across groups. Groups were described within a context of intergroup competition over scarce resources. In the Evaluation condition, children were asked to evaluate which resource distribution actions (...) were nicer. In the Expectation condition, children were asked to predict which events were more likely to occur. With age, children's evaluations and expectations of others' actions diverged: Children evaluated egalitarian actions as nicer yet expected others to behave in ways that benefit their own group. Thus, children's evaluations about the way human social actors should behave do not mirror their expectations concerning those individuals' actions. (shrink)

This feminist research explores how superstition is used by in-law's family to subordinate women business-owners in a highly patriarchal developing context. Whereas the exploration of gender subordination regarding women's entrepreneurship is almost exclusively confined to developed nations, little is known regarding the way women are subjugated in managing their small businesses in a patriarchal developing nation. This research generates data by conducting a case study on a woman's business in Bangladesh. This study yields unique insights by unfolding a specific form (...) of superstition that attempts to restrain a woman from continuing her small business. The paper reveals that the male relative caused a severe adverse impact on the personal life and business of the woman by employing superstition. With particular reference to superstition, this feminist study substantially extends the theoretical understanding of gender subordination within the context of small businesses of women in a highly patriarchal developing nation. The research strongly suggests policymakers to consider familial issues of women business-owners in designing programmes to empower them effectively. (shrink)

Recordar: To remember; from the Latin re-cordis, to pass back through the heart.Forgetting is not secondary; it is not an improvised failing of what has first been constituted as memory. Forgetfulness is a practice.In his search for a community that does not rely upon the false unities of subjectivity or identity, Maurice Blanchot looks to literature and writing. To achieve the common in community, Blanchot argues for the development of unworking writing practices aimed at the silence anterior to language—a silence (...) that constitutes authentic communication. Instead of abiding by the rules of grammar, Blanchot encourages writers to produce fragments, which constitutes one method of unworking writing. This... (shrink)

Mental health among students is one of the major concerns amidst the pandemic. Employing a correlational design, this study investigates the relationship between emotional intelligence and mental health among 152 senior high school students. Based on the statistical analysis, the r coefficient of 0.82 indicates a high positive correlation between the variables. The p-value of 0.00, which is less than 0.05, leads to the decision to reject the null hypothesis. Hence, a significant relationship exists between emotional intelligence and mental health (...) among senior high school. Implications were discussed in the study. (shrink)

There are few moral principles less controversial than “don’t touch people’s private parts without consent.” Though the principle doesn’t make explicit that there are exceptions, there clearly are some. Parents must wipe their infants. If an unconscious patient is admitted to the emergency room with a profusely bleeding laceration on their genitals, a doctor must give them stitches. The researchers who proposed the study in question, which would look for a connection between burn patients’ microbiomes and their clinical outcomes, presumably (...) believed they had identified an additional exception to the aforementioned principle. I argue that they did not. Rather, because of their tremendous inherent risks, we ought only to perform intimate procedures on those who can’t consent when the procedure is for their own good. -/- Intimate violations have been overlooked in both philosophy and medicine. Because of this, we have lacked an adequate conceptual framework for identifying certain kinds of harms research can inflict. When we understand these special risks, we see that the IRB was right to deny a waiver of consent. (shrink)

This research critically analyses patriarchal practices of male family members in terms of social relationships in businesses of women. The extant literature, which seeks to explore the negative influences of the family on women’s entrepreneurship, mostly revolves around the impact of patriarchal segregation of work on businesses. As such, it concentrates almost exclusively on the aspect of material gains through domestic responsibilities and childcare of women at the household sphere. This feminist study takes the debate forward with novel insights on (...) how menfolk of the family dominate, oppress and exploit women by directly getting involved in small businesses of women in a highly patriarchal developing nation, Bangladesh. From the interviews of the women business-owners, it is established that businesses of some women are adversely affected by male relatives’ social practices that are not tied to the domestic modes of production. Thus, the article significantly contributes to the understanding on gender subordination in women’s entrepreneurship from the narrow concentration on material gains of male family members to a more nuanced view of social practices. (shrink)

Following Peter Elbow’s work on ‘resonant voice’ or ‘presence’, this essay examines the seldom-explored resonance between a text and its writer in the moment of its creation. The essay asks what the boundaries and content of this space might look like, and how this knowledge might positively affect the creative product. It challenges the popular search for a writer’s ‘voice’, instead positing that each writer has a perpetually shifting internal plurality of voices, which unifies the constructivist and social constructionist views (...) of the self. By arguing that the resonance between writer and writing is the experience of this plurality coming to harmony, the essay posits that to create such a resonance involves a balance of simultaneously relinquishing control to the internal choir and learning how to better conduct it. (shrink)

Background: Short latency afferent inhibition provides a method to investigate mechanisms of sensorimotor integration. Cholinergic involvement in the SAI phenomena suggests that SAI may provide a marker of cognitive influence over implicit sensorimotor processes. Consistent with this hypothesis, we previously demonstrated that visual attention load suppresses SAI circuits preferentially recruited by anterior-to-posterior -, but not posterior-to-anterior -current induced by transcranial magnetic stimulation. However, cerebellar modulation can also modulate these same AP-sensitive SAI circuits. Yet, the consequences of concurrent cognitive and implicit (...) cerebellar influences over these AP circuits are unknown.Objective: We used cerebellar intermittent theta-burst stimulation to determine whether the cerebellar modulation of sensory to motor projections interacts with the attentional modulation of sensory to motor circuits probed by SAI.Methods: We assessed AP-SAI and PA-SAI during a concurrent visual detection task of varying attention load before and after cerebellar iTBS.Results: Before cerebellar iTBS, a higher visual attention load suppressed AP-SAI, but not PA-SAI, compared to a lower visual attention load. Post-cerebellar iTBS, the pattern of AP-SAI in response to visual attention load, was reversed; a higher visual attention load enhanced AP-SAI compared to a lower visual attention load. Cerebellar iTBS did not affect PA-SAI regardless of visual attention load.Conclusion: These findings suggest that attention and cerebellar networks converge on overlapping AP-sensitive circuitry to influence motor output by controlling the strength of the afferent projections to the motor cortex. This interaction has important implications for understanding the mechanisms of motor performance and learning. (shrink)

Research on evaluative conditioning (EC) shows that attitudes can emerge from co-occurrences of stimuli, and accumulating evidence suggests that EC usually depends on memory for these stimulus contingencies. Therefore, processes known to aid memory retention may be relevant for the development of stable attitudes. One such process may be memory consolidation, assumed to be promoted by waking rest and sleep. In two pre-registered experiments, we investigated whether waking rest (vs. cognitive activity, Experiment 1) and sleep (vs. wakefulness, Experiment 2) in (...) between conditioning and measurement of EC, consolidate contingency memory and EC. Contrary to our predictions, waking rest (vs. cognitive activity) promoted neither contingency memory nor EC effects. Sleep (vs. wakefulness) decreased forgetting of contingency memory but crucially, it did not attenuate the impact of counterconditioning on contingency memory. Sleep also did not influence EC effects, nor the reduction of EC by counterconditioning. EC effects in both experiments were predicted by contingency memory. Yet, unexpectedly, EC effects occurred in the absence of contingency memory after waking rest, but neither after sleep nor in the active control conditions. Our findings emphasise a role of contingency memory in EC, but it remains unclear whether this role changes during waking rest. (shrink)

Bilinguals have been shown to perform worse than monolinguals in a variety of verbal tasks. This study investigated this bilingual verbal cost in a large-scale picture-naming study conducted in Spanish. We explored how individual characteristics of the participants and the linguistic properties of the words being spoken influence this performance cost. In particular, we focused on the contributions of lexical frequency and phonological similarity across translations. The naming performance of Spanish-Catalan bilinguals speaking in their dominant and non-dominant language was compared (...) to that of Spanish monolinguals. Single trial naming latencies were analyzed by means of linear mixed models accounting for individual effects at the participant and item level. While decreasing lexical frequency was shown to increase naming latencies in all groups, this variable by itself did not account for the bilingual cost. In turn, our results showed that the bilingual cost disappeared when naming words with high phonological similarity across translations. In short, our results show that frequency of use can play a role in the emergence of the bilingual cost, but that phonological similarity across translations should be regarded as one of the most important variables that determine the bilingual cost in speech production. Low phonological similarity across translations yields worse performance in bilinguals and promotes the bilingual cost in naming performance. The implications of our results for the effect of phonological similarity across translations within the bilingual speech production system are discussed. (shrink)

In this article, I theorize the soundscape of Dene “myth”—stories and songs that are both philosophically and literally true—by defining an interpretive template for listening actively to these ecologically and spiritually powerful expressions. I offer two central and interlinked concepts for figuring the soundscape: (1) narrative revitalization and (2) animal grammar. Together these concepts describe the power of animal stories to live: and to enable life. As a key premise of my analysis, I accept Dene “myth” as true.

Once the Divine Law is established, of course, theology must be based upon it. Consequently, the arguments of the theologians involve nothing but quotations from the sacred texts. And these quotations provide the main evidence, sufficient and final, in terms of which any question is to be settled. The pivotal belief of most Islamic theologians is that God's Unity necessitates the dependence upon Him of all beings. If this were not the case, there would be the possibility of transforming God (...) into Gods. In ethics, for example, if man could judge what is good, he might overrule what God rightly prescribes for him, and this would be blasphemous. This view is theistic, then, in that the decider of all values is taken to be God. (shrink)

The under-representation of women on boards is a heavily discussed topic—not only in Germany. Based on critical mass theory and with the help of a hand-collected panel dataset of 151 listed German firms for the years 2000–2005, we explore whether the link between gender diversity and firm performance follows a U-shape. Controlling for reversed causality, we find evidence for gender diversity to at first negatively affect firm performance and—only after a “critical mass” of about 30 % women has been reached—to (...) be associated with higher firm performance than completely male boards. Given our sample firms, the critical mass of 30 % women translates into an absolute number of about three women on the board and hence supports recent studies on a corresponding “magic number” of women in the boardroom. (shrink)

Western media coverage of female genital modifications in Africa has been hyperbolic and one-sided, presenting them uniformly as mutilation and ignoring the cultural complexities that underlie these practices. Even if we ultimately decide that female genital modifications should be abandoned, the debate around them should be grounded in a better account of the facts.