Hans Morten Haugen offers an analysis of the intersection of intellectual property with health, traditional knowledge and biodiversity against a backdrop of established and emerging human rights. How those rights interface and who decides are among the most difficult issues in international intellectual property, and there is no doubt that there is room for fresh ideas on how to simultaneously achieve the goals of innovation, development and access. 0Also part of series: Library of Human Rights; 2.

Parfit's reductionist theory of personal identity states that a person's persistence through time is just a matter of psychological continuity and connectedness. He uses this theory to argue against the requirement of equal concern: the view that a rational person should be equally concerned about all parts of her future. The argument is that since psychological connectedness is one of grounds of a person's concern for her future and since connectedness is weaker over longer periods, it follows that a person (...) can rationally care less about her more distant future. I argue that Parfit's argument fails because the principles it employs generate counterexamples. I conclude by showing that if Parfit's view is modified so as to avoid these counterexamples, his argument against the requirement dissolves. (shrink)

This article introduces the concept of spiritual intelligence in terms of a natural human ability to take a different perspective on reality rather than an extraordinary ability to engage with a different/supernatural reality. From a cognitive perspective, spiritual intelligence entails a re‐balancing of the two main modes of human cognition, with a prioritization of the holistic‐intuitive mind over the conceptual one. From the psychological and phenomenological perspectives, it involves a different kind of engagement with information: slower, more participatory, less objectifying, (...) and not focused entirely on problem solving. The article ends with a reflection on the theological implications of the proposed model and how such an account of spiritual intelligence as knowing differently might relate to theological anthropology and the theology of the spirit and the spiritual. (shrink)

Craig Callender, Jonathan Cohen and Markus Schrenk have recently argued for an amended version of the best system account of laws – the better best system account (BBSA). This account of lawhood is supposed to account for laws in the special sciences, among other desiderata. Unlike David Lewis's original best system account of laws, the BBSA does not rely on a privileged class of natural predicates, in terms of which the best system is formulated. According to the BBSA, a contingently (...) true generalization is a law of a special science S iff the generalization is an axiom (or a theorem) of the best system relative to the set of predicates used by special science S. We argue that the BBSA is, at best, an incomplete theory of special science laws, as it does not account for typical features of special science laws, such as attached ceteris paribus conditions and the idealized character of law statements in these disciplines. (shrink)

A number of years ago we argued that Hartshorne’s psychicalism and his doctrine of divine memory are incompatible with contemporary big bang cosmology. Theodore Walker has responded to our objection by arguing that our understanding of psychicalism is flawed and that Hartshorne’s metaphysics has the resources for accommodating what the big bang theory says about the origin and fate of the universe. In the present article we attempt to show that Walker’s defense of Hartshorne fails.

Antallet sultne i verden har økt, selv om det kan diskuteres om det i dag er en høyere eller lavere andel som lider under sult enn for seks år siden – før matprisøkningen. Alle er uansett enige om at det samlet sett produseres nok mat i verden til at alle kan få dekket sine ernæringsbehov. Artikkelen viser at to hovedretninger i debatten om matproduksjon står mot hverandre. Den dominerende retningen fokuserer primært på matsikkerhet, forstått som økt matproduksjon og økt handel (...) med mat. Den andre retningen argumenterer for at interessene og rettighetene for de mest sårbare må ha forrang i politiske prioriteringer, og at de sårbare sikres best med en strategi basert på menneskerettigheter. Artikkelen drøfter landfordeling, økt bruk av genteknologi i landbruket og nedbygging av handelshindre for landbruksprodukter. Industrialisering av landbruket og liberalisering av handelen med landbruksvarer kan gi gode resultater på makronivå – på kort sikt. Dersom målet er å fremme situasjonen for de mest sårbare og samtidig møte klimautfordringene er løsningen en nedenfra-tilnærming, som til nå er blitt ignorert av de fleste stater.Nøkkelord: retten til mat, matsikkerhet, klima, Verdens handelsorganisasjon, FNs tusenårsmålEnglish summary: The struggle over food intake and food productionThe number of hungry persons in the world has increased – although it is debatable whether there is currently a higher or lower proportion of suffering from hunger than six years ago – before the food price increases. All agree that the overall production of food in the world is adequate for everyone's nutritional needs. The article demonstrates that there are two main approaches in the debate on food production. The dominant approach focuses primarily on food security, understood as increased food production and increased food trade. The other approach argues that the interests and rights of the most vulnerable must prevail, and that improvements for the vulnerable are best ensured with a strategy based on human rights. The article analyzes land distribution, increased use of genetic technology in agriculture and reduction of trade barriers for agricultural products. Industrialization of agriculture and the liberalization of trade in agricultural products can provide good results at the macro level – in the short term. If the goal is to promote the situation of the most vulnerable and at the same time addressing climate change, the solution is a bottom-up approach, which until now has been ignored by most states. (shrink)

Tax havens and tax secrecy have risen to the top of the global policy agenda and may constitute the most important impediment for reducing inequalities. Moreover, complex corporate structures allow charging for services undertaken in various countries through one low-tax country. Transferring profits to low-tax jurisdictions will significantly reduce a multinational corporation’s overall tax burden. Individuals are assisted in opening shell corporations that officially own bank accounts where the real owner is not revealed. Reducing this practice of tax dodging has (...) proven to be difficult, despite substantial efforts by several international organizations and states over the last decade. It is too easy to be removed from the list of tax havens; mere membership in OECD’s Global Forum on Transparency and Exchange of Information for Tax Purposes qualifies. Tax dodgers add to global inequalities and severely weaken states’ capacity to undertake their task of creating a solid tax base, embedded in the principle that all actors are taxed according to the income generated in each country. A weak tax base will lead to less trust, more violence and more deaths. Keywords: country-by-country reporting, EU, OECD, tax avoidance, tax evasion, tax havens. (shrink)

Features different perspectives on issues surrounding war, including such topics as the justification of war, resource scarcity, the war on terror, and surveillance tools.

Right to life is an essential natural right protected and defended by law. The aim of this publication is to discuss the main issues regarding human right to life and its protection in the Roman law. Article deals with the problems of beginning and end of the human life and legal capacity in Rome, elements of legal protection of slaves and family members subject to pater familias life as well as the principle crimes attempting to human life. First of all, (...) the right to life as well as the right to liberty were held to be the institutes of natural law (ius naturale) meanwhile institutes that provided possibility to withdraw those rights (e. g. patria potestas that in the most ancient époque included right to decide on subject person’s right to life) are derived from the branches of positive law—civil (ius civile) and law of nations (ius gentium). Such attitude of the Roman jurisprudence had a solid impact on recognizing right of life to be an inherent law of every person, deriving immediately from the human nature and not conferred by the society and the state. (shrink)

This Element analyzes Kant’s metaphysics and epistemology of the exact science of nature. It explains his theory of true motion and ontology of matter. In addition, it reconstructs the patterns of evidential reasoning behind Kant’s foundational doctrines.

This paper examines the origin, range and meaning of the Principle of Action and Reaction in Kant’s mechanics. On the received view, it is a version of Newton’s Third Law. I argue that Kant meant his principle as foundation for a Leibnizian mechanics. To find a ‘Newtonian’ law of action and reaction, we must look to Kant’s ‘dynamics,’ or theory of matter. I begin, in part I, by noting marked differences between Newton’s and Kant’s laws of action and reaction. I (...) argue that these are explainable by Kant’s allegiance to a Leibnizian mechanics. I show (in part II) that Leibniz too had a model of action and reaction, at odds with Newton’s. Then I reconstruct how Jakob Hermann and Christian Wolff received Leibniz’s model. I present (in Part III) Kant’s early law of action and reaction for mechanics. I show that he devised it so as to solve extant problems in the Hermann-Wolff account. I reconstruct Kant’s views on ‘mechanical’ action and reaction in the 1780s, and highlight strong continuities with his earlier, pre-Critical stance. I use these continuities, and Kant’s earlier engagement with post-Leibnizians, to explain the un-Newtonian features of his law of action and reaction. (shrink)

While every music lover senses the power and truth that reside in music, very few actually approach music as a path to cosmic knowledge. But the idea that the universe is created out of sound is an ancient one. This book brings together three contemporary German thinkers who exemplify this tradition: Marius Schneider, Rudolf Haase, and Hans Erhard Lauer.

In this paper we will try to identify the concrete ways in which John Locke describes the limits of toleration between different types of faith and its metaphysical foundations. From the beginning of his text A Letter Concerning Toleration, John Locke specifies that toleration is, first and foremost, a practical ideal and, secondly, a moral one. As such, toleration must be the essential feature of the true Church because in the field of religious faith any claimed superiority is in fact (...) only the expression of the struggle for power and domination. A theoretical perspective on the idea of religious toleration is also recalled from Lockeˈs radical empiricism, which correlates man's identity with his appearance at birth, for the first time in the world, as a different form from others. Such a view is contrary to metempsychosis which could lead to innate ideas in the human soul about moral principles and especially about God, as Plato or Descartes believed. Starting from the principles of toleration, John Locke's idea was to find those elements through which a fundamental separation between the Church and the State could be achieved. But toleration ceases when the Church and the State merge discreetly until they can no longer distinguish the boundaries between them. We consider that the fundamental principle of religious toleration is based on the idea of reciprocity, i.e. toleration-to-toleration and intolerance-to-intolerance, as Locke stated. This principle is also an essential landmark for a moral law on religious toleration in the contemporary, global world. (shrink)

Introduction : reinterpreting landscapes in an evolving world -- The pastoral tradition as inherited motives -- From classical pastorals to pastoral landscapes : rebirth of the landscape idea through analytical narration -- Instances of pastoral motivation in contemporary landscape analytical practice -- Articulating analytical narratives of contemporary pastoral landscapes -- The landscape analyst's pastoral action.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Ossian and the Invention of Textual HistoryKristine Louise HaugenIt is now controversial to call James Macpherson a forger or the poems of Ossian a hoax. 1 Encouraged by Derick Thomson’s 1952 demonstration that Macpherson’s Ossian indeed echoes authentic Gaelic verse, 2 a group of critics has undertaken to “rehabilitate” Macpherson, not least through a new critical edition of Ossian’s poems and related texts. 3 The edition makes it easier (...) than before to encounter Ossian directly:Morna, thou fairest of women, daughter of Cormac-Carbre? [sic] why in the circle of stones, in the cave of the rock, alone? The stream murmureth hoarsely. The blast groaneth in the aged tree. The lake is troubled before thee.... But thou art like snow on the heath. Thy hair like a thin cloud of gold on the top of Cromleach.... Thy arms, as two white pillars in the hall of Fingal. 4The authentic source of this passage seems to be the eighteenth-century commonplace that the savage and uneducated delight in figurative language, especially similes and metaphors—a commonplace enunciated often in the writings [End Page 309] of Hugh Blair, a literary critic deeply interested in Macpherson’s Ossianic productions. 5 As Harold Weinbrot and others suggest, the Ossian poems were celebrated largely because they confirmed readers’ most picturesque preconceptions about the “infancy of mankind.” 6There was room for disagreement. Many influential litterati were convinced of the poems’ antiquity, among them Goethe, Herder, Cesarotti, and a host of Scottish intellectuals. 7 But there were also detractors, mainly English—for example, Dr. Johnson and Edward Gibbon—although David Hume soon joined the skeptics, and the Scotsman Malcolm Laing issued the most crushing attack in the exchange several decades after Ossian’s first appearance in 1760. 8 The Ossian poems served a potent mixture of scholarly and political concerns, of which some were new but some were venerable. With a subtle but important shift in balance, the same mixture underlay the willingness of the most prominent eighteenth-century critics to discredit problematic texts and textual myths, even at the cost of an apparent reduction in historical knowledge. 9 For all parties Macpherson’s Ossian invited not only aesthetic delectation, but sustained thought about the relationship between early poetry and history and the value of early texts for reconstructing the past. [End Page 310]The question of British origins had preoccupied seventeenth-century antiquaries for a number of reasons, including Polydore Vergil’s unflattering Anglica Historia (first published 1546). 10 In the campaign to establish respectable national roots the Celtic druids had quickly become a kind of favorite example; they were presented early and often as heroes of British culture. The druids and their associates the bards had been described in their French setting by classical authors; William Camden, John Selden, and others transferred them easily to Celtic Britain. It was then straightforward to suggest further that the British Celts were the first discoverers of writing and philosophy, or at least discoverers concurrent with the ancient Hebrews, or both, this theory having been elaborated for the French Celts through Annius of Viterbo’s historical forgeries of 1498 and Annius’s French partisans. 11In fact this theory placed England at a disadvantage as Scotland, Ireland, and Wales had the more convincing joint claim to Celtic ancestry. Individual claims for Scotland and Ireland were frequently heard as well. The text most relevant to Ossian was the deist John Toland’s 1726 history of the druids, in which Toland both satirized the eighteenth-century clergy and argued that the ancient Celts of France and Scotland were colonists from Ireland—the original home of druidism, learning, and Toland. 12 In Toland’s version the theory made much of certain unpublished Irish manuscripts, supposedly dating from Cicero’s day and written in the “native” Irish alphabet. St. Patrick had burned hundreds of druidical religious books when he arrived in Ireland—proof that the Celts had a written language—but the bardic histories, couched in rugged verse, had escaped the evangelist’s flames. 13 Clearly, any respectable reply would need to draw on ancient manuscripts too.Even for readers unfamiliar with Toland, Macpherson’s texts... (shrink)

Annette von Droste-Hülshoff’s fragment ›Ledwina‹, like its homonymous protagonist, has a primarily medial, and therefore transmissive, profile. This profiling is based on Ledwina’s suffering which at the same time provides the material for overcoming it. Assuming a – tentatively formulated – poetics of decrescence, this specific constellation can be traced insofar as the dwindling but not completely disappearing (text) body is concerned with its epistemic-poetological potential. A potential which allows for the aesthetic and human pathological approaches to (literary) figures of (...) suffering to be reconfigured. The concept of trans-corporeality (S. Alaimo) clarifies this reconfiguration. From this perspective, the text opens up to an ethics of vulnerability and puts the impositions of a standardizing health episteme up for discussion. (shrink)

1. Lewis White Beck describes Kant as engaging in a ‘two-front war’ against the rationalists and empiricists in an attempt to solve the problems of epistemology. Both groups, according to Kant, were mistaken in believing that there is but one ultimate source or faculty of knowledge. Discuss critically Kant’s attack on these two positions with particular reference to the distinction between analytic and synthetic judgements and Kant’s notion of synthetic a priori judgements. To what extent do you think that the (...) distinction between these three kinds of judgements is valid? In your response you should refer to the arguments by Quine (‘Two Dogmas of Empiricism’) and Strawson/Grice. (shrink)

A naturalistic scheme of primitive conceptual representations is proposed using the statistical measure of mutual information. It is argued that a concept represents, not the class of objects that caused its tokening, but the class of objects that is most likely to have caused it (had it been tokened), as specified by the statistical measure of mutual information. This solves the problem of misrepresentation which plagues causal accounts, by taking the representation relation to be determined via ordinal relationships between conditional (...) probabilities. The scheme can deal with statistical biases and does not rely on arbitrary criteria. Implications for the theory of meaning and semantic content are addressed. (shrink)

Language learning requires linguistic input, but several studies have found that knowledge of second language rules does not seem to improve with more language exposure. One reason for this is that previous studies did not factor out variation due to the different rules tested. To examine this issue, we reanalyzed grammaticality judgment scores in Flege, Yeni-Komshian, and Liu's study of L2 learners using rule-related predictors and found that, in addition to the overall drop in performance due to a sensitive period, (...) L2 knowledge increased with years of input. Knowledge of different grammar rules was negatively associated with input frequency of those rules. To better understand these effects, we modeled the results using a connectionist model that was trained using Korean as a first language and then English as an L2. To explain the sensitive period in L2 learning, the model's learning rate was reduced in an age-related manner. By assigning different learning rates for syntax and lexical learning, we were able to model the difference between early and late L2 learners in input sensitivity. The model's learning mechanism allowed transfer between the L1 and L2, and this helped to explain the differences between different rules in the grammaticality judgment task. This work demonstrates that an L1 model of learning and processing can be adapted to provide an explicit account of how the input and the sensitive period interact in L2 learning. (shrink)

he article combines Elinor Ostrom’s design principles for common-pool resources and human rights provisions, including subsequent clarifications and jurisprudence. It analyses whether stronger local self-governance, embedded in the natural resource dimension of peoples’ rights to self-determination is a recommendable approach. Two changes in understanding are noted. First, the universal approval of indigenous peoples’ right to self-determination as specified in the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. Second, the wide endorsement of the specific principle of free and prior informed (...) consent. As the exercise of peoples’ rights to self-determination is done on a collective level, it is important to have awareness of whether particularly affected and marginalized households and individuals are included or not included in the decision-making process. The article then reviews a range of new instruments adopted by the OECD and the UN for improved human rights awareness and compliance in the context of economic investments. The article finds that these instruments are still underutilized. Finally, the article identifies the role of human rights in bilateral investment treaties. It finds that there are less jurisdictional restrictions – as many treaties have a wide understanding of applicable law – than cognitive restrictions – as human rights competence is rarely sought when establishing tribunals mandated to solve investments disputes. (shrink)

This paper examines the young Kant’s claim that all motion is relative, and argues that it is the core of a metaphysical dynamics of impact inspired by Leibniz and Wolff. I start with some background to Kant’s early dynamics, and show that he rejects Newton’s absolute space as a foundation for it. Then I reconstruct the exact meaning of Kant’s relativity, and the model of impact he wants it to support. I detail (in Section II and III) his polemic engagement (...) with Wolffian predecessors, and how he grounds collisions in a priori dynamics. I conclude that, for the young Kant, the philosophical problematic of Newton’s science takes a back seat to an agenda set by the Leibniz-Wolff tradition of rationalist dynamics. This results matters, because Kant’s views on motion survive well into the 1780s. In addition, his doctrine attests to the richness of early modern views of the relativity of motion. (shrink)

Newton rested his theory of mechanics on distinct metaphysical and epistemological foundations. After Leibniz's death in 1716, the Principia ran into sharp philosophical opposition from Christian Wolff and his disciples, who sought to subvert Newton's foundations or replace them with Leibnizian ideas. In what follows, I chronicle some of the Wolffians' reactions to Newton's notion of absolute space, his dynamical laws of motion, and his general theory of gravitation. I also touch on arguments advanced by Newton's Continental followers, such as (...) Leonhard Euler, who made novel attempts to defend his mechanical foundations against the pro-Leibnizian attack. This examination grants us deeper insight into the fate of Newton's mechanics on the Continent during the early eighteenth century and, more specifically, sheds needed light on the conflicts and tensions that characterized the reception of Newton's philosophy of mechanics among the Leibnizians. (shrink)

ABSTRACTIn this paper, I will investigate the compatibility of different metaphysics of time with the powers view. At first sight, it seems natural to combine some sort of powers ontology with a dy...

Much scholarship has claimed the physics of Emilie du Châtelet’s treatise, Institutions de physique, is Newtonian. I argue against that idea. To do so, I distinguish three strands of meaning for the category ‘Newtonian science,’ and I examine her book against them. I conclude that her physics is not Newtonian in any useful or informative sense. To capture what is specific about it, we need better interpretive categories.