My experience concerning cases similar to the Wanglie case indicates that there was virtually no possibility of a solution for the conflict between the different expectations of the Wanglie family and those of the physicians caring for Helga Wanglie. A persistent vegetative state precludes a return to consciousness unless an extraordinary phenomenon takes place. Therefore, the physicians expected to be relieved of the duty of continuing to give Mrs. Wanglie respiratory care. However, her family thought it their duty to provide (...) their loved one with the best possible treatment. The family based their position on the claim that life is God's gift and that only He has the right to terminate it. Such spiritual convictions are perceived as reflective of a higher “truth” and are not predisposed to negotiation or change according to the situation. (shrink)

In this book, Omar Farahat presents a new way of understanding the work of classical Islamic theologians and legal theorists who maintained that divine revelation is necessary for the knowledge of the norms and values of human actions. Through a reconstruction of classical Ashʿarī-Muʿtazilī debates on the nature and implications of divine speech, Farahat argues that the Ashʿarī attachment to revelation was not a purely traditionalist position. Rather, it was a rational philosophical commitment emerging from debates in epistemology and (...) theology. He further argues that the particularity of this model makes its distinctive features helpful for contemporary scholars who defend a form of divine command theory. Farahat's volume thus constitutes a new reading of the issue of reason and revelation in Islam and breaks new ground in Islamic theology, law and ethics. (shrink)

O artigo propõe abordar a construção da imagem de Isabel, a Católica aproximando Luiz de França foi um dos mais significativos mestres de maracatu nação. Dirigiu e articulou o maracatu Nação Leão Coroado, entre os anos de 1950 até sua morte, em 1997. Ainda hoje a sua memória é reivindicada por grupos de maracatus existentes no Recife. Tal questão indica diferentes aspectos nos processos de construção das memórias, e da forma como estas são usadas no presente. Este artigo objetiva discutir (...) e analisar as performances de Luiz de França, bem como suas estratégias cotidianas a partir das memórias dos maracatuzeiros pernambucanos. Entendendo a memória como fruto dos processos históricos, também é objetivo deste trabalho analisar as diferentes formas como a memória é construída, trazendo à tona questões de ordem teórico-epistemológica a respeito da cultura negra, dos maracatus e dos maracatuzeiros recifenses. (shrink)

Today we are all familiar with the iconic pictures of the nebulae produced by the Hubble Space Telescope’s digital cameras. But there was a time, before the successful application of photography to the heavens, in which scientists had to rely on handmade drawings of these mysterious phenomena. Observing by Hand sheds entirely new light on the ways in which the production and reception of handdrawn images of the nebulae in the nineteenth century contributed to astronomical observation. Omar W. Nasim (...) investigates hundreds of unpublished observing books and paper records from six nineteenth-century observers of the nebulae: Sir John Herschel; William Parsons, the third Earl of Rosse; William Lassell; Ebenezer Porter Mason; Ernst Wilhelm Leberecht Tempel; and George Phillips Bond. Nasim focuses on the ways in which these observers created and employed their drawings in data-driven procedures, from their choices of artistic materials and techniques to their practices and scientific observation. He examines the ways in which the act of drawing complemented the acts of seeing and knowing, as well as the ways that making pictures was connected to the production of scientific knowledge. An impeccably researched, carefully crafted, and beautifully illustrated piece of historical work, Observing by Hand will delight historians of science, art, and the book, as well as astronomers and philosophers. (shrink)

A distinctive focus of 19th- and 20th-century Latin American philosophy is the convergence of identity formation and political liberation in ethnically and racially diverse postcolonial contexts. From this perspective, Omar Rivera interprets how a "we" is articulated and deployed in central political texts of this robust philosophical tradition. In particular, by turning to the work of Peruvian political theorist José Carlos Mariátegui among others, Rivera critiques philosophies of liberation that are invested in the redemption of oppressed identities as conditions (...) for bringing about radical social and political change, foregrounding Latin America's complex histories and socialities to illustrate the power and shortcomings of these projects. Building on this critical approach, Rivera studies interrelated epistemological, transcultural, and aesthetic delimitations of Latin American philosophy in order to explore the possibility of social and political liberation "beyond redemption.". (shrink)

Introduction -- Stout's proto-new-realism -- Situating G.F. Stout -- Stout's doctrine of primary and secondary qualities -- Stout and the Brentano School -- Representative function of presentations -- Sensible space and real space -- Cook Wilson's geometrical counter-example -- Stout's central question -- Ideal constructions -- Ideal constructions in psychology and epistemology -- British new realism : the language of madness -- Stout's criticisms of Alexander -- Alexander's response -- The nature of sensations, images, and other presentations -- What is (...) the metaphysical problem? -- "How can the interpretation which is supplied by the mind be a constituent of the [physical] object?" -- Some general remarks -- British new realism : the language of common-sense -- T.P. Nunn and the new realism -- Nunn and things -- Nunn's postulate -- Russell and Stout on sensible objects -- Russell, sense-data and sensibilia -- The methods of construction -- Russell's constructions and Nunn's postulate -- Constructions, psychology, and the essence of philosophy -- The methods of logical construction -- A mathematical development -- The principle of abstraction. (shrink)

These work proposes to delimit and put into perspective the spot of the particular in Theodor Adorno's aesthetics, based on his displacements, especially considering: 1) the relationship between specific works of art and the tradition; 2) the relationship between works of art with themselves and with society; and, 3) the relationship between the particular and the universal – as a critical appropriation of Hegel's thought by Adorno, explicit in specific works by Beethoven and Berg. The relational juxtaposition, as superscripted in (...) the three topics, will allow us to perceive the effects of the displacements of the particular which, once configured within the works of art, establishes itself as a denial and criticism of the current state of affairs, insofar as it points to the contradictions of the social fabric, but, denying its modus operandi, by appearing as a mode of non-coercive totality of the universal over the particular, within which the particular moves and, in its movement, determines itself and determines the universal. It is this mode of determination, effected by the displacements of the particular, that will position the work of art as an articulating agent – ​​from within – of possible ways that are distinct from the current ways of knowing and living in society. (shrink)

Resumen: Este texto consiste básicamente en una presentación general de la corriente filosófica del nuevo realismo surgida en 2007 y en la que participan autores europeos y norteamericanos. Un punto en común de las diversas posiciones dentro de esta corriente es el deslinde crítico frente a la filosofía posmoderna y a la filosofía moderna en general. Explico esta crítica y sus implicaciones para la posibilidad de un restablecimiento en la filosofía contemporánea del pensamiento metafísico.: This text is basically an overview (...) of philosophical new realism which emerged in 2007 and involves European and American authors. A common point to the various positions within this current is a critical detachment from postmodern philosophy and modern philosophy in general. i explain this criticism and its implications for the possibility of a restoration in contemporary philosophy of metaphysical thought. (shrink)

Con base en la teoría valorativa de las emociones, desarrollada por Frijda y sus colegas, se argumenta que los sentimientos pueden entenderse como parcialmente isomorfos a las emociones, cuyo rasgo fundamental radica en las disposiciones de un individuo a creer en sus experiencias emocionales y actu..

One of the criticisms directed at the accounting profession is that auditing and accounting standards are subjective in nature and do not represent the society's widespread interests and values. This paper examines whether a general consensus exists regarding the significance of incorporating society's values into auditing standards. The examination revealed the lack of such general agreement and further indicated that the perceptual differences are subjective in nature and not influenced by the participant's qualifications, income, experience, gender or marital status.

Informed by Gloria Anzaldúa's and José Carlos Mariátegui's work, as well as by Andean cosmology, Omar Rivera turns to Inka stonework and architecture as an example of a "Cosmological Aesthetics." He articulates ways of sensing, feeling and remembering that are attuned to an aesthetic of water, earth and light. On this basis, Rivera brings forth a corporeal orientation that can be inhabited by the oppressed, one that withdraws from predominant modern/Western conceptions of the human. By providing an aesthetic analysis (...) of cosmological sensing, Rivera sets the stage for exploring physical dimensions of anti-colonial resistance, and furthers the Latinx and Latin American tradition of anti-colonial and liberatory philosophy. Seeingaesthetic involvements with the cosmos as a source for embodied modes of resistance, Rivera turns to the work of María Lugones and Enrique Dussel in order to make explicit the aesthetic dimensions of their work. Andean Aesthetics and Anticolonial Resistance creates a new dialogue between art historians, artists, and philosophers working on Latin American thought, phenomenology, and hermeneutics. It weaves together a Latin American philosophy that connects pre-Columbian cosmologies with contemporary thinkers. Rivera's original approach introduces us to the living, evolving and aesthetic alternatives to coloniality of power and of knowledge, overhauling current understandings of decolonial theory and opening the tradition in transformative ways. (shrink)

On one classical conception of God, God has no parts, not even metaphysical parts. God is not composed of form and matter, act and potency, and he is not composed of existence and essence. God is absolutely simple. This is the doctrine of Absolute Divine Simplicity. It is claimed that ADS implies a modal collapse, i.e. that God’s creation is absolutely necessary. I argue that a proper way of understanding the modal collapse argument naturally leads the proponent of ADS to (...) reject a particular premise of the argument: namely, “the same identical cause brings about the same effect.” However, I argue that the rejection of that premise leads to a deeper problem for ADS. It leads to an explanatory gap: how can we explain the relevant type of indeterminism in an absolutely simple God? (shrink)

Comparing Carol Gould’s Globalizing Democracy and Human Rights to other recent discussions of global justice, Dahbour argues that her work offers two important theoretical departures: It grounds global rights and democracy along foundationalist rather than constructivist lines; and it rejects the notion that just global institutions require the equal input of all those affected by their activities, defending instead that only those engaged in the “common activity” of institutions should participate in the decision-making. On the basis of this common activity (...) guideline, Dahbour argues against Gould that we should not move toward “globalizing democracy” (or political cosmopolitanism) because globalization has been mostly a project of U.S. Empire. Instead, furthering democracy andhuman rights requires the strengthening of local democracy and support of the global justice movement as an antiglobalization movement. [Abstract prepared by the Editors.]. (shrink)

The principle of national self-determination has usually been justified by extending to national groups an entitlement that individuals are regarded as having, namely, to the conditions necessary for their self development. In order to extend the concept of self-determination to nations in this way, an argument that it is important for nations to exist within their own political communities must be given. In this essay, I describe and criticize one type of argument for such a principle of national self-determination – (...) what I will call the communitarian argument.Contemporary communitarians (such as Michael Walzer and David Miller) usually contend that determining who rightfully has membership in a political community must precede the allocation of rights and responsibilities between members. Community is understood to mean a national community; membership in communities therefore results from the ascription of national identities to individuals and to the consequent sorting out of loyalties that follows from this ascription. A right of self-determination for nations is required, on this view, in order to ensure that political communities are legitimately formed in accordance with national identities. (shrink)

Nascido há mais de 2.500 anos, na Índia, o budismo se apresenta como uma das cinco grandes religiões mundiais, tendo mais de 506 milhões de adeptos. Ao redor do mundo, diversas pesquisas vêm sendo desenvolvidas para conhecer tanto a religião quanto a filosofia budista, mas em termos de Brasil, isso ainda é um assunto pouco abordado.

O budismo é a quarta maior religião do mundo, reunindo cerca de meio bilhão de seguidores. No Brasil, por outro lado, esta religião representa uma parcela muito pequena da população, cerca de apenas 0,13%, num total de 245 mil budistas. Contudo existe uma ilusão de que há um crescimento do budismo no Brasil, pois tem ocorrido um despertar pela indústria do bem-estar, em especial em meditações mindfullness, workshops e imersões de meditações, páginas de jornais e revistas tratam sobre este assunto. (...) Mas este despertar pelo orientalismo não se reflete no número de seguidores do budismo no Brasil. Se compararmos o crescimento do budismo ao longo do CENSO com o crescimento da população brasileira no mesmo período, veremos que o budismo não cresceu na mesma proporção, o que representa um decréscimo na proporção da população do número de adeptos. Para compor o presente ensaio foi realizada revisão bibliográfica, análise dos dados históricos do CENSO e análise crítica da situação. (shrink)

Graphical AbstractThis paper discusses how our bad reading habits are starting to influence how we write. This short abstract and the picture next to it summarize the arguments in this paper. Just kidding, they do not. One really needs to read the paper for that.

Bu araştırma, Birinci Mushaf Projesi’nden yarım asır sonra gerçekleşen önemli bir projeyi ortaya çıkarmayı hedeflemektedir. Bu proje, hicrî 84 ve 85 yılları arasında Irak’ın Vâsıt şehrinde zamanın Kûfe ve Basra (Irâkeyn) valisi Haccâc b. Yûsuf’un (ö. 95/714) girişimi ve Emevî Halifesi Abdülmelik b. Mervân’ın desteğiyle uygulamaya koyulmuştur. Projenin yürütülmesini ise Hasan-ı Basrî (ö. 110/728) üstlenmiş ve hafızlar, kâtipler ve kârîler gibi çok sayıda uzman kişiden oluşan komisyonlara başkanlık etmiştir. Bu çalışmada Giriş’in ardından bu projeye yol açan etkenlerden söz edilmiştir. Bunların (...) başında da üçüncü Halife Osman’ın başlattığı Kur’an metninde birliğin sağlanması düşüncesi gelmektedir. Daha sonra bu projenin sahibi Haccâc’tan bahsedilmiş, bu projenin nerede ve ne zaman gerçekleştiği, projede yer alan önemli şahsiyetlerin kimler olduğu şeklindeki bir dizi soru cevaplanmıştır. Daha sonra Proje’nin hedefleri hakkında ayrıntılara girilmiş, Haccâc’ın Osman Mushaf’ında toplam on bir harfte değişiklik yaptığı isnâdında bulunan rivayetler tartışılmış, bu rivayetler incelenerek eleştiri süzgecinden geçirilmiş ve İkinci Mushaf Projesi’nin Hz. Peygamber ve hulefâ-i râşidîn döneminde gerçekleştirilen Birinci Mushaf Projesi’ni tamamlayıcı mahiyette olduğu sonucuna ulaşılmıştır. Ardından İslam devletinin tanık olduğu siyasi çalkantıların ardından İkinci Mushaf Projesi’nin akıbetinin ne olduğu hususuna değinilmiştir. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Paradoxical Pleasures of Human ImaginationOmar Sultan HaqueHow Pleasure Works: The New Science of Why We Like What We Like, by Paul Bloom. W. W. Norton, 2010, 280 pp., $26.95.Have you heard about that chump who dished out $48,875 for John F. Kennedy's dusty old tape measure? The rock star who allegedly snorted his father's ashes with some cocaine? The creepy German guy who put out an advertisement for (...) someone who would let themselves be eaten by him (only to have hundreds volunteer)? The story about the man who was tired with his wife, but powerfully aroused when he was convinced he was with an exact duplicate of her? How can a staunch atheist also believe in the numinous? Why do people buy expensive wines, and bottled water, even though in blind taste tests, they can't distinguish them from the cheap stuff? Why buy pâté when your palate can't distinguish it from dog food? Why do people pay hundreds of dollars to hear the famous violinist Joshua Bell perform, but then cannot even spare a dime when a disguised Bell plays the same music on the subway in regular garb? Why might someone who trains people to prevent falls and injury enjoy watching a comedian fall and hurt himself? Why would someone pay a few hundred thousand dollars for art that consisted of someone else's unmade bed?It may be is easy to feel smug when thinking about this panoply of apparent irrationality in individual decisions and general human propensities. But the things that uniquely delight us may not be as [End Page 182] capricious as they seem. Many of the pleasures (curious or ordinary) that we get from our relationships with food, sex, irreplaceable objects, performances, safety and pain, music, literature and the imagination may have a deeper logic. They may be explicable by a better understanding of how our evolved minds work, and don't work, amidst our historically novel environments. Or so argues Paul Bloom—a cognitive developmental psychologist at Yale University—in How Pleasure Works, a brilliant and articulate synthesis of philosophy, psychology, evolutionary biology and the arts that elucidates the seemingly whimsical and once mysterious sources of our uniquely human hedonic satisfactions.The theory Bloom utilizes to systematize aspects of a number of pleasure phenomena is called psychological essentialism. This is an idea that has been developed in the last two decades by Bloom and the psychologists Douglas Medin, Andrew Ortony, Frank Keil, and Susan Gelman, among others.1 Psychological essentialism claims that, as Bloom puts it, people reliably, at a very young age, cross-culturally and throughout history, think that "things have an underlying reality or true nature that one cannot observe directly and it is this hidden nature that really matters." We assume that objects, artifacts, non-human animals, people and groups have invisible essences and unseen orders that account for their surface properties. In one of Keil's experiments, for instance, children thought that a dog made to look like a toy dog, a porcupine that had a surgery to make it look like a cactus, and a tiger stuffed into a lion suit were still a dog, porcupine and tiger, respectively. However, when each animal had its 'innards' altered, children said the animals changed into different categories, like objects or plants.2 Psychological essentialism for artifacts or tools is somewhat different from that for animate entities; the essence of artifacts is their history and the intentions of their creators.3According to How Pleasure Works, because of psychological essentialism, many human delights seem to arise that cannot be explained by simply appealing either to their low-level sensual qualities or their practical utility. Thus, the theory helps clarify some of pleasure's paradoxes. Like parents who affectionately keep tokens of their children's time as a baby, someone can enjoy owning a tape measure from a famous person because of its history of uses or other associations with important places or people. Snorting dad's ashes (however noxious to the nostrils), or pigging out on someone whom you admire, can be deeply meaningful because it feels as if one is... (shrink)

Chromosomal rearrangements frequently occur at specific places (“hot spots”) in the genome. These recombination hot spots are usually separated by 50–100 kb regions of DNA that are rarely involved in rearrangements. It is quite likely that there is a correlation between the above‐mentioned distances and the average size of DNA loops fixed at the nuclear matrix. Recent studies have demonstrated that DNA loop anchorage regions can be fairly long and can harbor DNA recombination hot spots. We previously proposed that chromosomal (...) DNA loops may constitute the basic units of genome organization in higher eukaryotes. In this review, we consider recombination between DNA loop anchorage regions as a possible source of genome evolution. (shrink)

Interest in postmodernity has stagnated over the past decade and has come to be partially replaced by a concern with globalization. While the two terms are often considered to be divergent there is continuity as theoretical discourse transfers from one to the other. In what follows, we first distill the heuristic models employed by various knowledge-geographical traditions of social thought in conceptualizing postmodernism. We then transpose these models into recent debates on globalization. Globalization theory has become the provenance of British (...) and American theorists because of a contiguity that extends back to a propitious model employed to understand postmodernism. Globalization theory in France and Germany are largely non-existent or tangential for similar reasons that find opposite tendencies. The spatial and temporal aspect inherent to both the modern and postmodern indicates that both already present a stance on globalization. Among the key factors predicting the fortunes of heuristic models is the continuation of classical theoretical concerns in the present situation of globalization. Post-classical tendencies in heuristic models indicate that more cloistered postmodern concerns do not transfer well to globalization. Those heuristic models that conceive of a postmodernist break are those whose application to present instantiations of globalization is subsequently limited. (shrink)

One of the open questions in Educational robots is the role a robot should take in the classroom. The current focus in this area is on employing robots as a tool or in an assistive capacity such as the invigilator of an exam. With robots becoming commonplace in the classroom, inquiries will be raised regarding not only their suitability but also their ability to influence and control the morality and behaviour of the students via their presence. Therefore, as a means (...) to test this cross-section of Educational robots with the underlying issue of morality and ethics we conducted an empirical study where the Nao robot invigilated an exam for a group of students. A between-subjects design compared whether Nao was able to deter students from cheating and maintaining their discipline in comparison to a human invigilator or when there was no invigilator present. Our results showed that while explicit cheating rarely took place across all conditions, the students were significantly more talkative when they were invigilated by Nao. In conclusion, we discuss and speculate upon some of the ensuing implications towards not only the application of robots in education but also consequently the wider issue of the preservation of morality and ethics in a classroom in the presence of an agent. (shrink)