This paper examines the historiography of the Front de Liberation Quebecois within the context of three frameworks, each used to devaluate the FLQ, the idea of separation, its potential support and most importantly, the perspectives of historians who oppose these frameworks. Through an examination of the literature, the FLQ are framed as an attack on British liberalism, an attack on Canadian Unity, or violent in a political climate where such actions were unjustifiable. These understandings work cooperatively together to de-legitimize alternative (...) views on FLQ history, and Quebec independence. I will examine also the benefits in studying the FLQ outside of the tensions of separation and the potential for future study in the history of the FLQ. (shrink)

Enquanto estudiosos debatem os termos “espiritualizado/a” e “religioso/a”, surgem no cenário pessoas que prontamente se auto-identificam como sendo “espiritualizadas mas não religiosos/as” (SNR) ou “religiosas mas não espiritualizadas” (RNS) ou ainda como sendo, simultaneamente, “espiritualizadas e religiosas” (BSR), ou então, “nem espiritualizadas nem religiosas (NONE). Este estudo investigou como estas categorias auto identificatórias relacionam-se à essência e estilo das orações das pessoas e outras características com base em crenças religiosas. Participantes ( N = 103) responderam a uma pesquisa via internet. (...) RNS e SNR não apresentaram respondentes suficientes para uma análise. Não houve distinção entre os BSR e SNR em relação à essência de suas orações e percepções de Deus como amor ou controle. Igualmente, os dois grupos valorizaram suas posições de fé para se auto-identificarem. BSR relataram maior proximidade de Deus. Os respondentes das categorias BSR e SNR foram significativamente diferentes em muitas características relacionadas aos estilos (por exemplo, frequência aos cultos; frequência e duração da oração; idade da primeira oração). Estes dois grupos foram semelhantes em suas preferências pela prática da oração a sós. Tais resultados sugerem que as diferenças que designam as categorias “espiritualizado/a” e/ou “religioso/a” podem ter mais a ver com o estilo do que a essência do sistema de fé abraçado. Key words : Religioso/a. Espiritualizado/a. Oração. Essência. Estilo.While scholars debate the terms “spiritual” and “religious,” people readily self-identify as “spiritual not religious (SNR),” “religious not spiritual (RNS),” “both spiritual and religious (BSR),” or “neither spiritual nor religious (NONE).” This study investigated how these self labels related to the substance and style of people’s prayers and other faith-based features. Respondents ( N = 103) completed an internet survey. RNS and NSR did not have enough respondents for analysis. BSR and SNR groups were indistinguishable with regard to the substance of their prayers and perceptions of God as loving or controlling. Likewise the two groups equally valued their faith positions as important for self-identity. BSR reported greater nearness to God. BSR and SNR respondents were significantly different on many style related characteristics (e.g., attendance at formal services; frequency and duration of prayer; age at first prayer). They were similar in their preferences for praying alone. These results suggest that the differences between claiming the designation of “religious” and / or “spiritual” may have more to do with the style than the substance of the faith system embraced. Palavras-chave: Religious. Spiritual. Prayer. Substance. Style. (shrink)

This paper attempts to test to what level the distinction can be made between Maoism, Mao Tse-Sung’s theory of revolutionary communism, as it functioned in China during the People’s Revolution and in South America. This paper will compare the Maoist ideology of two Maoist leaders and their revolutionary movements: Mexico’s Florencio Medrano and Peru’s Abimael Guzman.

A pesquisa quantitativa tem sido predominante nos estudos sobre oração. A partir de uma abordagem qualitativa baseada na análise de conteúdo, este estudo examina as relações entre oração e saúde. Os dados são provenientes de 104 vídeos com entrevistas gravadas com participantes de igrejas Católicas, Protestantes e Pentecostais. A análise levantou quatro categorias descritivas do uso da oração: 1. Como estratégia de coping (enfrentamento) (62,5%); 2. Para manter viva a espiritualidade (15,3%); 3. Como técnica de empoderamento mútuo (8,6%); 4. Como (...) ponto de mudança no processo existencial (13,4%). Correspondem a estas categorias, respectivamente, os tipos de oração: 1. Petição, Lamentação; 2. Descanso, Sacramental, 3. Intercessão; 4. Conversão, Chamado; Movimento do Espírito. De acordo com a literatura corrente, a oração proporciona formas de conexão orientadas “para dentro/si mesmo” ; “para cima/divino” e “ para fora/outro” . Os resultados sugerem uma modalidade de conexão ainda não estudada: a conectividade epifânica – que se origina no sagrado, vem ao encontro do humano, e marca um ponto de mudança no processo existencial. Os achados indicam estreita relação entre oração e saúde mental e espiritual, como diminuição da ansiedade, direção e propósito na vida, e apontam a importância de maiores estudos na interface entre teologia e psicologia da religião. Palavras-chave: Oração. Coping religioso espiritual. Saúde mental e espiritual. Psicologia da religião. Subjetividade.Quantitative research has been prevalent in the studies on prayer. Using a qualitative approach based on content analysis, this study examines the relationship between prayer and health. Data come from 104 recorded interviews of participants from Catholic, Protestant and Pentecostal traditions. The analysis found four categories that describe the use of prayer: 1. Prayer as a religious coping strategy (62,5%); 2. Prayer as a discipline to keep spirituality alive (15,3%); 3. Prayer as a technique of mutual empowerment (8,6%); 4. Prayer as a turning point in the existential process (13,4%). The types of prayer corresponding to these categories are: 1. Petitionary and Lamentation; 2. Rest and Sacramental; 3. Intercessory prayer; 4. Conversion; Calling; Movement of the Spirit. According to the current literature, prayer provides inward, outward and upward connectivity. The results indicate an additional connectivity not yet studied: the Epiphanic connectivity, which comes from sacred to human and marks a turning point in the existential process. The outcomes suggest a close relationship between prayer and spiritual and mental health by decreasing anxiety, making meaning and purpose in life, and point out the relevance and need for further studies on the interface between theology and psychology of religion. Key words : Prayer. Spiritual religious coping. Mental and spiritual health. Psychology of religion. Subjectivity. (shrink)

This brief essay describes the significance of Hillary Putnam's "Collapse of the Fact/Value Dichotomy" for Catholic thinkers who are inspired by Thomas Aquinas.

Finnis claims that his theory proceeds from seven basic principles of practical reason that are self-evidently true. While much has been written about the claim of self-evidence, this article considers it in relation to the rigorous claims of logic and mathematics. It argues that when considered in this light, Finnis equivocates in his use of the concept of self-evidence between the realist Thomistic conception and a purely formal, modern symbolic conception. Given his respect for the modern positivist separation of fact (...) and value, the realism of the Thomistic conception cannot be the foundation for the natural law as Finnis would reconstruct it. Nor can the purely formal modern conception of self-evidence provide a foundation for practical reason. This raises some doubt as to whether there can be self-evident principles of practical reason as Finnis suggests. The article contributes to the analysis of the Finnis reconstruction of the natural law by providing a rigorous analysis of his claim for self-evidence. It frames this analysis historically, suggesting the roles that certainty and mystery play in the apprehension of moral meaning. (shrink)

In this book Feinberg presents seven essays that explore various topics in law, morality, and political theory. The first two essays deal with questions about the relationship between morality and legal theory. The first essay, on natural law jurisprudence, offers a compact introduction to the debate between legal positivists and natural law thinkers. Focusing on the fugitive slave cases during the American Civil War, Feinberg argues that the unquestionable immorality of slavery suggests the illegitimacy of laws institutionalizing it, and thus (...) at least in extreme cases the legitimacy of a law can turn on the morality of the institutions it serves. (shrink)

This essay introduces the philosophy of legal information (PLI), which is a response to the radical changes brought about in philosophy by the information revolution. It reviews in some detail the work of Luciano Floridi, who is an influential advocate for an information turn in philosophy that he calls the philosophy of information (PI). Floridi proposes that philosophers investigate the conceptual nature of information as it currently exists across multiple disciplines. He shows how a focus on the informational nature of (...) traditional philosophical questions can be transformative for philosophy and for human self-understanding. The philosophy of legal information (PLI) proposed here views laws as a body of information that is stored, manipulated, and analyzed through multiple methods, including the computational methodologies. PLI offers resources for evaluating the ethical and political implications of legal infomatics (also known as "legal information systems"). -/- This essay introduces PLI. Parts I and II describe Floridi's philosophy of information. First, Part I introduces the transformation in the concept of information that occurred in the twentieth century through the work of Alan Turning and Claude Shannon. Part II describes Floridi's approaches to traditional questions in epistemology, ontology, and ethics. Part III applies PI to the analysis of legal positivism. It suggests that PLI is a viable project that has potential for transforming the understanding law in the information age. -/- . (shrink)

Some Anglophone legal theorists look to analytic philosophy for core presuppositions. For example, the epistemological theories of Ludwig Wittgenstein and Willard Quine shape the theories of Dennis Patterson and Brian Leiter, respectively. These epistemologies are anti-foundational since they reject the kind of certain grounding that is exemplified in Cartesian philosophy. And, they are coherentist in that they seek to legitimate truth-claims by reference to entire linguistic systems. While these theories are insightful, the current context of information and communication technologies (ICT) (...) has created new informational concepts and issues. As a result, the analytic epistemologies are increasingly challenged by alternative perspectives. One such alternative is Structural Realism (SR), which is influential among the natural sciences, and especially physics. “Informational Structural Realism,” (ISR) is a variant of SR that was introduced by Luciano Floridi. Unlike the coherentist theories, ISR promotes examination of the connections among types of information and informational structures. It is an important shift for legal theory today, since the challenges that the ICT presents have to do with pattern recognition across vast domains of diverse data. An informational jurisprudence is now required to understand the issues emerging from the ICT. (shrink)

Source code is a form of human communication, albeit one where the information shared between the programmers reading and writing the code is constrained by the requirement that the code executes correctly. Programming languages are more syntactically constrained than natural languages, but they are also very expressive, allowing a great many different ways to express even very simple computations. Still, code written by developers is highly predictable, and many programming tools have taken advantage of this phenomenon, relying on language model (...) surprisal as a guiding mechanism. While surprisal has been validated as a measure of cognitive load in natural language, its relation to human cognitive processes in code is still poorly understood. In this paper, we explore the relationship between surprisal and programmer preference at a small granularity—do programmers prefer more predictable expressions in code? Using meaning‐preserving transformations, we produce equivalent alternatives to developer‐written code expressions and run a corpus study on Java and Python projects. In general, language models rate the code expressions developers choose to write as more predictable than these transformed alternatives. Then, we perform two human subject studies asking participants to choose between two equivalent snippets of Java code with different surprisal scores (one original and transformed). We find that programmers do prefer more predictable variants, and that stronger language models like the transformer align more often and more consistently with these preferences. (shrink)

Brian Z. Tamanaha has written extensively on realism in jurisprudence, but in his Realistic Theory of Law (2018), he uses "realism" in a commonplace way to ground a rough outline of legal history. While he refers to his method as genealogical, he does not acknowledge the complex tensions in the development of the philosophical use of that term from Nietzsche to Foucault, and the complex epistemological issues that separate them. While the book makes many interesting points, the methodological concerns outweigh (...) them in the overall assessment of the value of the work. (shrink)

This paper is a study about Philadelphia’s comprehensive user engagement sites (CUESs) as the authors address and examine issues related to the upcoming implementation of a CUES while seeking solutions for its disputed questions and plans. Beginning with the federal drug schedules, the authors visit some of the medical and public health issues vis-à-vis safe injection facilities (SIFs). Insite, a successful Canadian SIF, has been thoroughly researched as it represents a paradigm for which a Philadelphia CUES can expand upon. Also, (...) the existing criticisms against SIFs are revisited while critically unpackaged and responded to in favor of the establishment. In the main section, the authors propose the layout and services of the upcoming CUES, much of which would be in congruent to Vancouver’s Insite. On the other hand, the CUES would be distinct from Insite, as the authors emphasize, in that it will offer an information center run by individuals in recovery and place additional emphasis on early education for young healthcare professionals by providing them a platform to work at the site. The paper will also briefly investigate the implementation of a CUES site under an ethical scope of the Harm Reduction Theory. Lastly, the authors recommend some strategic plans that the Philadelphia City government may consider employing at this crucial stage. (shrink)

The use of Big Data—however the term is defined—involves a wide array of issues and stakeholders, thereby increasing numbers of complex decisions around issues including data acquisition, use, and sharing. Big Data is becoming a significant component of practice in an ever-increasing range of disciplines; however, since it is not a coherent “discipline” itself, specific codes of conduct for Big Data users and researchers do not exist. While many institutions have created, or will create, training opportunities to prepare people to (...) work in and around Big Data, insufficient time, space, and thought have been dedicated to training these people to engage with the ethical, legal, and social issues in this new domain. Since Big Data practitioners come from, and work in, diverse contexts, neither a relevant professional code of conduct nor specific formal ethics training are likely to be readily available. This normative paper describes an approach to conceptualizing ethical reasoning and integrating it into training for Big Data use and research. Our approach is based on a published framework that emphasizes ethical reasoning rather than topical knowledge. We describe the formation of professional community norms from two key disciplines that contribute to the emergent field of Big Data: computer science and statistics. Historical analogies from these professions suggest strategies for introducing trainees and orienting practitioners both to ethical reasoning and to a code of professional conduct itself. We include two semester course syllabi to strengthen our thesis that codes of conduct can be harnessed to support the development of ethical reasoning in, and a sense of professional identity among, Big Data practitioners. (shrink)

Chemokines (chemotactic cytokines) drive and direct leukocyte traffic. New evidence suggests that the unusual CCR6/CCL20 chemokine receptor/ligand axis provides key homing signals for recently identified cells of the adaptive immune system, recruiting both pro‐inflammatory and suppressive T cell subsets. Thus CCR6 and CCL20 have been recently implicated in various human pathologies, particularly in autoimmune disease. These studies have revealed that targeting CCR6/CCL20 can enhance or inhibit autoimmune disease depending on the cellular basis of pathogenesis and the cell subtype most affected (...) through different CCR6/CCL20 manipulations. Here, we discuss the significance of this chemokine receptor/ligand axis in immune and inflammatory functions, consider the potential for targeting CCR6/CCL20 in human autoimmunity and propose that the shared evolutionary origins of pro‐inflammatory and regulatory T cells may contribute to the reason why both immune activation and regulation might be controlled through the same chemokine pathway. (shrink)

BackgroundDespite rapid growth of the scientific literature, no consensus guidelines have emerged to define the optimal criteria for editors to grade submitted manuscripts. The purpose of this project was to assess the peer reviewer metrics currently used in the surgical literature to evaluate original manuscript submissions.MethodsManuscript grading forms for 14 of the highest circulation general surgery-related journals were evaluated for content, including the type and number of quantitative and qualitative questions asked of peer reviewers. Reviewer grading forms for the seven (...) surgical journals with the higher impact factors were compared to the seven surgical journals with lower impact factors using Fisher’s exact tests.ResultsImpact factors of the studied journals ranged from 1.73 to 8.57, with a median impact factor of 4.26 in the higher group and 2.81 in the lower group. The content of the grading forms was found to vary considerably. Relatively few journals asked reviewers to grade specific components of a manuscript. Higher impact factor journal manuscript grading forms more frequently addressed statistical analysis, ethical considerations, and conflict of interest. In contrast, lower impact factor journals more commonly requested reviewers to make qualitative assessments of novelty/originality, scientific validity, and scientific importance.ConclusionSubstantial variation exists in the grading criteria used to evaluate original manuscripts submitted to the surgical literature for peer review, with differential emphasis placed on certain criteria correlated to journal impact factors. (shrink)

Following are excerpts from the keynote speech delivered to the second of the Colloquium 2000 series on applied media ethics by Kevin Klose, president and chief executive officer of National Public Radio. Mr. Klose spoke in the Robert E. Lee chapel at Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Virginia, November 2, 2001. This colloquium sought to unearth global values in media ethics.

The legal corpus linguistics movement is one of the most exciting recent developments in legal theory. Justice Thomas R. Lee and Stephen C. Mouritsen are its pioneers, and their new article thoughtfully responds to critics. Here, Part I applauds their response as a cautious account of how those methods might, in some circumstances, provide relevant evidence about ordinary meaning in legal interpretation. Some disagreements persist, but The Corpus and the Critics makes significant progress in academic debates about legal interpretation. Part (...) II turns from theory to practice: Judges are increasingly discussing corpus linguistics and conducting sua sponte analyses in their opinions, and this Essay collects and analyzes these cases. Corpus linguistics is theorized as apolitical, neutral, and objective. But in practice, it has been used largely by Republican-appointed judges, often inconsistently with standards that Lee and Mouritsen recently endorse. This Essay identifies a set of best practices, endorsed both by Lee and Mouritsen’s new cautious account and by many critics of the movement. It elaborates those commitments and evaluates whether they are met by courts citing or conducting legal corpus linguistics. If courts continue to employ legal corpus linguistics methods, the practice should be guided by these shared standards. (shrink)

Structural requirements of rationality prohibit various things, like having inconsistent combinations of attitudes, having means-end incoherent combinations of attitudes, and so on. But what is the distinctive feature of structural requirements of rationality? And do we fall under an obligation to be structurally rational? These issues have been at the heart of significant debates over the past fifteen years. Some philosophers have recently argued that we can unify the structural requirements of rationality by analyzing what is constitutive of our attitudes (...) (Lee, 2020; Worsnip, 2018a). It has also been suggested that, in the course of good first-personal deliberation, agents should treat structurally irrational combinations of attitudes as off-limits (Worsnip, 2021). In this paper, I raise a worry for these two theses concerning structural rationality. Roughly, I argue that some imperfect epistemic agents (like us) can be disposed to have structurally irrational combinations of attitudes. Also, when these imperfect agents deliberate, they should not treat structurally irrational combinations of attitudes as off-limits. Given our imperfections, being structurally irrational can very well be the best option we have. More generally, these observations reveal that structural rationality should not always be theorized independently from more “substantive” norms, like responsiveness to reasons or expected value optimization. (shrink)

Traces Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben's engagement with deconstructive thought from his early work in the 1960s to the present, examining his key concepts - infancy, Voice, potentiality, sovereignty, bare life, messianism - in relation to key texts and concepts in Jacques Derrida's work.

This contribution describes some of the relations between early analytic philosophy in Cambridge and philosophy in Austria: Stout’s early approval of the writings of Brentano and his students; the high opinion in Cambridge of the Austrian way of doing philosophy. It also outlines two Austrian versions of ideas which were to be very important in early Cambridge philosophy: Husserl on definite descriptions and Meinong on structural similarities.

The research described here explores the idea of using Supreme Court oral arguments as pedagogical examples in first year classes to help students learn the role of hypothetical reasoning in law. The article presents examples of patterns of reasoning with hypotheticals in appellate legal argument and in the legal classroom and a process model of hypothetical reasoning that relates them to work in cognitive science and Artificial Intelligence. The process model describes the relationships between an advocate’s proposed test for deciding (...) a case or issue, the facts of the hypothetical and of the case to be decided, and the often conflicting legal principles and policies underlying the issue. The process model of hypothetical reasoning has been partially implemented in a computerized teaching environment, LARGO (“Legal ARgument Graph Observer”) that helps students identify, analyze, and reflect on episodes of hypothetical reasoning in oral argument transcripts. Using LARGO, students reconstruct examples of hypothetical reasoning in the oral arguments by representing them in simple diagrams that focus students on the proposed test, the hypothetical challenge to the test, and the responses to the challenge. The program analyzes the diagrams and provides feedback to help students complete the diagrams and reflect on the significance of the hypothetical reasoning in the argument. The article reports the results of experiments evaluating instruction of first year law students at the University of Pittsburgh using the LARGO program as applied to Supreme Court personal jurisdiction cases. The learning results so far have been mixed. Instruction with LARGO has been shown to help law student volunteers with lower LSAT scores learn skills and knowledge regarding hypothetical reasoning better than a text-based approach, but not when the students were required to participate. On the other hand, the diagrams students produce with LARGO have been shown to have some diagnostic value, distinguishing among law students on the basis of LSAT scores, posttest performance, and years in law school. This lends support to the underlying model of hypothetical argument and suggests using LARGO as a pedagogically diagnostic tool. (shrink)

Social theory can sometimes seem as though it's speaking of a world that existed long ago, so why should we continue to study and discuss the theories of these dead white men? Can their work still inform us about the way we live today? Are they still relevant to our consumer-focused, celebrity-crazy, tattoo-friendly world? This book explains how the ideas of classical sociological theory can be understood, and applied to, everyday activities like listening to hip-hop, reading fashion magazines or watching (...) reality TV. Taking the reader through central sociological texts, Social Theory In Popular Culture explains why key theorists – from Marx to Saussure – are still considered to be the bedrock of sociology and sociological enquiry. Each chapter examines a different key thinker and applies their work to a recognisable aspect of popular cultural, showing how the central issues underpinning classic social thought - class, conflict, gender, power, ethnicity, and social status - can still be readily observed within the modern global world. Encouraging the reader to critique and reflect upon the ways in which classic social theory applies to their own worlds, this is the perfect antidote to dry social theory explanations. It is an eye-opening read for all students and scholars across the social sciences. (shrink)

Although there are compelling reasons for believing otherwise, compassion cannot provide a basis for grounding a viable theory of civil and political society. Firstly, it is often irrational or personally irresponsible to be compassionate. Secondly, relations based on compassion do not require characteristics that are essential for a viable civil and political society. Thirdly, the unpredictable consequences of compassion are such that compassion alone is not sufficient for grounding a viable civil and political society. Finally, obligating people to be compassionate (...) is antithetical to what is required for being compassionate. (shrink)

I argue that naturalistic pictures provide a guide and a justification for our concept of colour. The crucial relation between pictures and colours is to be brought out, not by reference to the ‘internal’ relations between colours (for example, what differentiates green from red), but by considering how colours are differentiated from the wider range of visually discriminable qualities. Naturalistic pictures effect such a differentiation by simulating colour-like qualities such as gold, amber, and blond, while requiring nothing beyond the three-dimensional (...) manifold of colour space. The seeming simplicity and salience of colour in our visual experience should be recognized as depending on our familiarity with this reductive power of naturalistic pictures. While some sense of these issues has been given expression by many thinkers, the idea is significantly articulated in remarks of Wittgenstein's that were prompted by his reading of a letter the painter Runge wrote to Goethe. (shrink)