In this article, I aim to contribute to the remedy of the current under-theorization of discourse on food ethics and politics from the perspective of the Islamic food tradition by proposing a formulation of an Islamic conception of food justice that extends the religious discourse on food beyond that of dietary laws. The conception of Islamic food justice that I propose makes explicit the connections between the religious, ethical, and political discourses on food. First, I argue that the similarity between (...) the central question of the secular approach to food ethics and that of the modern interpretation of the religious approach to food is best understood as a consequence of the shared assumption of the modern concept of subjectivity. Second, I argue that problematizing the concept of subjectivity that underlies both the secular and the religious approaches to food ethics is key to challenging the boundaries of the current disciplinary-bound discourses as it would allow for a reformulation of the central question beyond that of individual identity and extend the religious discourse on food to the realm on politics. (shrink)

Sacred Rituals and Humane Death critically analyzes the civilizing nature of the underlying fundamental concept of "humaneness" in contemporary discourses around modern meat and animal ethics. As religious methods of animal slaughter, such as the halal method in Islam, as well as the practice of religious animal sacrifice, are sometimes categorized as barbaric in recent debates, the civilizing narrative of progress leads supposedly to more humane adaptation of methods and practices of animal curation and slaughter. This volume argues that the (...) shift toward modern meat does not constitute a shift toward less pain and suffering as purported by supporters of contemporary methods, particularly mass agriculture. Rather, it is a shift in what is considered as acceptable versus unacceptable pain and suffering. In this work, the author analyzes the concealment and distancing that characterize modern meat production, uncovering the "acceptable" pain and suffering involved in these procedures heralded as "progress" and advocating for a retrieval of earlier, tradition-bound practices rooted in religious, cultural, and ethical respect of animals and their important and sacred roles in sacrifice. (shrink)

This is the first volume in which an account of personal autonomy is developed that both captures the contours of this concept as it is used in social philosophy and bioethics, and is theoretically grounded in, and a part of, contemporary autonomy theory. James Stacey Taylor’s account is unique as it is explicitly a political one, recognizing that the attribution of autonomy to agents is dependent in part on their relationships with others and not merely upon their own mental (...) states. The volume is distinctive in its examples, which touch on the ethics of using inducements to encourage persons to participate in medical research, the ethical issues associated with the use of antibiotics, and the ethical basis for both patient confidentiality and informed consent. (shrink)

Informed consent, decision-making styles and the role of patient-physician relationships are imperative aspects of clinical medicine worldwide. We present the case of a 74-year-old woman afflicted with advanced liver cancer whose attending physician, per request of the family, did not inform her of her true diagnosis. In our analysis, we explore the differences in informed-consent styles between patients who hold an "independent" and "interdependent" construal of the self and then highlight the possible implications maintained by this position in the context (...) of international clinical ethics. Finally, we discuss the need to reassess informed-consent styles suitable to the needs of each patient regardless of whether he or she resides in the United States or in Japan. (shrink)

Data on patterns of marriage, differential fertility and mortality were collected from 211 Kotia women residing in Visakhapatnam district of Andhra Pradesh, India. Consanguineous marriages made up just over a quarter of the total, and of these, father's sister's daughter (FSD) were more common than mother's brother's daughter (MBD). The mean inbreeding coefficient for the sample (F) was 0·0172. Women in consanguineous marriages had a lower mean number of total conceptions, live births and living offspring (net fertility) than women in (...) non[hyphen]consanguineous marriages. Significant heterogeneity was found in the means of living offspring for FSD, MBD and non-consanguineous couples, but not for conceptions and live births. (shrink)

Open peer commentary on the target article “How and Why the Brain Lays the Foundations for a Conscious Self” by Martin V. Butz. Excerpt: This paper is full of stimulating and creative ideas. It posits that an anticipatory drive is what guides the development in the brain of a set of internal motor models, specifically a set of inverse and forward models. Through these models becoming increasingly complex, a conscious self develops. This is a simple and important thesis, if true. (...) But is it? As my title suggests, it may be so for sportsmen, with their emphasis on ever more refined motor responses. However, those of a more cerebral nature may find themselves burdened by all those coupled internal motor models and not able to think as clearly as they would like. This is not to say that prediction isn’t a useful property to possess, both for finance (especially now) and in one’s general living patterns. But the question I wish to consider is: What sort of predictive model can lead to thinking? (shrink)

Rao is a major force in parapsychology research having first published in the '50s, and this book publication is right up to date in 2017. The book Is almost three hundred pages of text spread out over nine chapters. I initially found book title to be confusing because it could be taken to mean something like a primer or an introduction of the essential parts of parapsychology. Whereas in fact the book is more like a selection of discrete areas of (...) parapsychology such as psi missing (the tendency to actively avoid the ‘target’ of a psi experiment, to the point of statistical deviation away from chance); the experimenter effect (similar to the experimenter effect of conventional psychology, but here the suggestion is that experimenters are using their own psychic powers to influence experimental results); and problems with replication in psi experiments; and some other philosophical or epistemological considerations. I’ll come back to the question of the title at the end of the review. There is much to recommend in this book but there are also problems depending on what one's expectations are in reading the book. (shrink)

//static.cambridge.org/content/id/urn%3Acambridge.org%3Aid%3Aarticle%3AS0031819100019719/resource/na me/firstPage-S0031819100019719a.jpg.

The writer's object in the following pages has deliberately been not so much to supply information as to provoke the desire for it. If any of his readers should be led by anything he has said to seek further knowledge of Plato and his influence on thought and literature, in the works mentioned in the appended Bibliography or in other places, the end will have been attained.

Driving anxiety is a relatively undervalued topic of research, despite the fact that it can have a substantial detrimental impact on an individuals’ life. The prevalence of driving anxiety in motor vehicle crash survivors has been found to range from 18-77%. Although driving anxiety can develop without crash involvement, no information currently exists on the prevalence of driving anxiety in the general population. One barrier to gathering this information is that most of the instruments are designed to measure driving anxiety (...) in MVC survivors. However, the Driving and Riding Avoidance Scale is one instrument that shows promise as a more general measure of driving anxiety, although previous research has noted the need for some minor adaptations. Therefore, the present study investigated the psychometric properties of an adapted version of the DRAS and the level of driving anxiety amongst a sample of 210 Polish participants. Internal consistency for the overall DRAS was.91 and ranged from.77 to.85 for the subscales. Factor analysis of the DRAS resulted in two clear factors, with the first containing driving avoidance items and the second consisting solely of riding avoidance items. Therefore it appears that the DRAS can be a useful measure of driving avoidance in samples drawn from the general population as well as MVC survivors. (shrink)

This study is an investigation of the impact of Spinozan metaphysics on German-speaking writers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In terms of specific works by Friedrich Schiller and C.F. Meyer, this influence has hitherto gone unnoticed. Though it has long been recognized that George Büchner was profoundly affected by Spinozism, in-depth treatments of this important dimension of his thought have, by and large, been lacking. This book contains an attempt to come to terms with significant aspects of Büchner's reception (...) of Spinoza, as found both in his literary and non-literary writings. (shrink)

Knowledge Representation and Reasoning (KR&R) is based on the idea that propositional content can be rigorously represented in formal languages long the province of logic, in such a way that these representations can be productively reasoned over by humans and machines; and that this reasoning can be used to produce knowledge-based systems (KBSs). As such, KR&R is a discipline conventionally regarded to range across parts of artificial intelligence (AI), computer science, and especially logic. This standard view of KR&R’s participating fields (...) is correct — but dangerously incomplete. The view is incomplete because, as we explain herein, sophisticated KR&R must rely heavily upon philosophy. Encapsulated, the reason is actually quite straightforward: Sophisticated KR&R must include the representation of not only simple properties, but also concepts that are routine in the formal sciences (theoretical computer science, mathematics, logic, game theory, etc.), and everyday socio-cognitive concepts like mendacity, deception, betrayal, and evil. Because in KR&R the representation of such concepts must be rigorous in order to enable machine reasoning (e.g., machine-generated and machine-checked proofs that a is lying to b) over them, philosophy, devoted as it is in no small part to supplying analyses of such concepts, is a crucial partner in the overall enterprise. To put the point another way: When the knowledge to be represented is such as to require lengthy formulas in expressive formal languages for that representation, philosophy must be involved in the game. In addition, insofar as the advance of KR&R must allow formalisms and processes for representing and reasoning over visual propositional content, philosophy will be a key contributor into the future. (shrink)